Well, Bob, it looks like a perfectly lovely garden to me. All silliness
aside, I think that rocks provide people a little rest for their eyes-
and a focal point. Being fond of plants and a pleb myself I can enjoy
those gardens where lots of deucedly expensive rocks have been imported,
but I have to say that they aren't really necessary to grow plants. And
I am too busy doing other things to go buy a bunch of rocks myself- so I
just ignore the suggestion that all of the rock in the garden should be
the same type and use whatever I can get free for the most part. What I
do have is a bit of the native tufa from an extinct hot spring about 1
1/2 hours drive from here, and a fair number of rocks personally
shlepped down from the nearby cascade mountains. As we can see from
your pictures, the garden is doing fine without all those expensive
special stones.
So if you must feel inferior about your lack of "bourgeois elitist
stone" in your fine garden, by all means go off to the local boulder
store with an ounce of gold or two in hand and purchase your dream rock
(s). I will say that stone gives lasting value, anyway- nobody will
steal it and it will be there quite a long time. Just plunk the newly
obtained rock on top of one of your local bunnies (I am sorry to hear
about the bunnies), and even if it isn't artfully arranged, you will
have a slight smile on your face when you walk by.
My eye was caught, by the way, by a quotation at the bottom of your
page. It goes like this- "For every minion of the peaks there are a
dozen steppe children growing in the dry Continental heart of all
hemispheres still unknown to hroticulture". I like that quotation, and
Thank Heavens it is in English! Is it from you, or did you borrow it?
The reason I ask is that I am in charge of PR for the Northwestern
Chapter of Nargs' 2012 Winter Study Weekend, and it is going to be a
study of the flora of "just east of the far west"- or a lot of flora in
Washington that hasn't received much attention. I don't know a whole
lot about that flora myself, and I think that we may be the first to do
a study weekend on these plants- it is sort of exciting. At any rate,
that quote seems to me to fit our WSW very well, and I wonder if I may
borrow it.
Ilse Burch
Sammamish, Washington
On 1/13/2011 9:22 AM, penstemon wrote:
>Perhaps they thought your efforts at growing rocks would eventually
be successful and they didn't want to embarrass you in your lack of
visible rocks. It isn't nice to point out people's difficulties.
Maybe you had merely sown pebbles, or grains of sand and they
expected, in time, for those to grow to rock size.
I never thought of that. Another excuse to add to the list.
It was an enormous pile of pea gravel. There are several raised beds
here with purchased rocks (sorry, I mean stone, of course), and one
with "indigenous" rocks. I wanted another rock garden, but didn't want
any more indigenous rocks, and didn't want to buy any more. My motto
being "aut Caesar aut nihil", I decided on no rocks and to start a
movement favoring proletarian rock gardens rather than the elitist
ones hat use imported stone and fancy designs.
http://nargs.org/smf/index.php?topic=312.0 That's what it looked
like. I then ordered some sandy loam topsoil and piled that on top. I
mixed the topsoil (devoid of earthworms) with the pea gravel, sort of,
and then tried to conceal the overall ugliness with plants, and
mulched with gravel the next size up from pea gravel.
In order to stave off the sort of spontaneous criticism that seems to
erupt in certain people, I simply asked them, "Isn't that the ugliest
piece of crap you've ever seen?", whereupon they would say things
like, "Well, uh, not really, though ....I don't know.......it does
need a certain something...."
"Like what? Bourgeois elitist stone?"
"Yes. Perhaps one or two pieces artfully laid here and there..."
Artfully, well, that's the problem, but I guess they're right.
Bob Nold
Denver, Colorado, USA
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