If you enjoy rock gardens...
You might like a crevice garden, a model of urban sustainability
Ecologically minded gardens are in vogue, which is all to the good. One of the hallmarks of a successful landscape is that it is in harmony with its place, in its flora, planting aesthetic and general mood.
But it is worth knowing that the contemporary broad interest in plant naturalism is a relatively recent impulse. For the past century or more, gardeners have wanted to grow plants that were decidedly exotic and spectacularly different; the list includes non-native versions of roses, azaleas, hostas and lilies, for example.
Sometimes the craving for exotica meant creating whole new growing environments, none more adventurous than the rock garden. Done well, a rock garden evokes a high country scree. Done badly, that is, hesitantly, it looks as though a dump truck just delivered a load of rubble.
Botanically, a rock garden opens up a whole new world. There are some curious and lovely native wildflowers for such a place, though rock gardeners have been drawn to grow difficult far-off alpine plants or desert flora.
But there is something even more adventurous than a rock garden — a more extreme version called a crevice garden.
A while ago, Tony Avent sent me pictures of the crevice garden at his Plant Delights Nursery at Juniper Level Botanic Garden in Raleigh, North Carolina.
A rock garden typically is formed from soil and grit and gravel piled between boulders. A crevice garden, however, uses slabs of stone set vertically and close together. There is less expanse of growing space and virtually no soil as such. Avent’s is remarkable for its size — about 300 feet long and about 6 feet high — and for its material. Instead of using quarried stone, he used broken concrete slabs from a property he was clearing for a new home. This saved hauling 70 cubic yards of material to the landfill. But once he started in 2017, he got crevice fever and in February finished the whole installation using salvaged concrete from four other sites. He estimates the concrete pieces weigh 400,000 pounds.
In the photos, the garden looked a bit industrial, but in person — wonderful.
The concrete is clearly not natural, but its rhythms and textures are read as an abstract version of a rock