No mountain required — the consoling charms of alpine plants

For two nights in late January my garden lay under snow. I had not believed the forecast and had spent the previous afternoon trimming long avenues of flowering pears and hornbeams, a yearly winter job to keep them trim in summer.

Overnight, six inches of snow drifted where it was most needed, over my beds of alpine and mountain plants. They love a snow blanket, a long-awaited relief from months of the heavy winter rain they detest.

On the lawn beyond them, snowfalls revealed a printout of exuberant animal activity. I can recognise traces of a rabbit and the toe-prints of foxes when out for the night. I have to report that social distancing has not been observed by either of them.

I am puzzled by footprints bigger than a badger’s. Bears are not known to range the Cotswolds, even in snow, nor are jaguars, the nearest match in my old I-spy handbook of four-legged prints. I would opt for a muntjac, especially as I saw one, the least welcome visitor to a garden, only five days before the snowfall, but its hooves do not match what I sketched as a reminder.

I will assume, until disproved, that the prints belong to a Heffalump on night-time release from the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh. Fortunately, it stayed on the grass. A Heffalump on my alpine beds would be disastrous, crushing the campanulas and gouging out the gentians.

They have done nothing to deserve such rough treatment. They have been the supreme consolation of my months since lockdown, taking me back to my gardening’s deepest roots. I hope to persuade you to put down roots with them too.

If you do not want to bother with a rock garden, never mind. Most of the plants now sold as alpines do not need rocks around them in order to grow well. They will grow very well in pots and pans. Being small, they are excellent options for ever-smaller gardens, for downsizing in retirement
or for small terraces and balconies.

In recent years, the point has been beautifully made for us by D’Arcy & Everest in Huntingdonshire (darcyeverest.co.uk), gold-winning exhibitors at the Chelsea Flower Show. They display small hardy plants, some from mountain homes, grown in bowls, pans or any flat receptacle. They look charming and I recommend their guidance about what to choose. They will also sell pre-planted containers, which make the detailed choices on your behalf.

My years of growing mountain plants outdoors have taught me a cardinal lesson. In a flowerbed, almost all of them, except woodlanders, are happiest in gritty soil. I buy bags of horticultural grit from garden centres or fine-grade grit from builders’ merchants. I mix it into good garden soil, allowing the grit to dominate the mixture. I fill my main beds with this gravelly gritty mixture to the depth of a spade and since I began, survivals and performance have been transformed.

One easy way of expressing it is to say that dianthuses now live from one wet winter to the next, saved by the sharp drainage round their roots and necks. This year has tested them severely, but I have not yet lost a single plant. At least 60 per cent of the soil is now grit and gravel but in summer, it stays fresh and damp below the surface. Remember how damp the centre of a pile of gravel remains, even in a dry summer.

As soon as you take up mountain plants you have another ally besides bags of grit. Last year was the 90th anniversary of Britain’s Alpine Garden Society, membership of which costs £36 annually (ags@alpinegardensociety.net). It brings four colour bulletins a year, full of information for beginners, travellers and experts alike. It allows you to participate in the annual seed exchange.

Its website connects you to a local branch, one of 44 across the country, and to its invaluable encyclopedia, which describes nearly 25,000 alpine plants. At intervals in the locked-down day, I flick on this database, transporting myself to nature’s loveliest flowers, many of which I have never seen. Post-vaccination, the habit will be hard to break.

I joined in 1963, lapsed after 30 years of bulletins and was rejoined as a birthday present last autumn. I owe a valued literary friendship to my first phase of membership, one with travel writer Norman Lewis, author of
Naples ’44, classic books on Burma and Indonesia and on the missionaries who were all too active in Central America.

What does one say to such an icon if you meet one in the flesh? Lamely,
I asked him what had most influenced his lucid literary style. “Articles in the Alpine Garden Society bulletin,” he replied, probably hoping to shut me up, “as the main contributors show the imprint of a classical education.” We became friends on the spot. “I do not believe in belief,” Lewis liked to repeat, but from his Essex home, he certainly believed in the AGS.

Alpines have been the supreme consolation of my months since lockdown, taking me back to my gardening’s deepest roots

In normal years, the AGS holds regular shows to which top alpine nurseries come to sell plants, including plants not prominent in their own published lists. It also exhibits at Chelsea Flower Show, where its displays win top medals and include privately grown plants that the rest of us can only envy. If Chelsea goes ahead this year, the society will stage the anniversary exhibit it intended to show last year. It ought to be quite a sight.

Meanwhile, alpine nurseries are mostly willing to supply by post, a joy
in these travel-restricted periods. Here are some of Britain’s best: Kevock Garden Plants, just south of Edinburgh (kevockgarden.co.uk), Pottertons in Lincolnshire (pottertons.co.uk), Edrom Nurseries, also in Scotland (edrom-nurseries.co.uk), Slack Top nursery in the Pennines (slacktopnurseries.co.uk) and Hartside Nursery in Cumbria near Penrith (plantswithaltitude.co.uk). When choosing, be sure to check if a plant is acid-loving and hates lime soil, a need that may rule it out of your garden.

Under the recent snow blanket, my plants are not just from families for experts only. Anyone can grow an aethionema, small and shrubby with pink flowers; an erodium, especially lovely guttatum whose white flowers are marked with dark brown; silvery-leaved euryops, which even grow in part shade; most of the flat-growing campanulas and the low hypericums with yellow flowers.

Be sure to try an appropriate gentian, either a nursery’s selected form of the blue trumpet-flowered Gentiana acaulis or one of the lovely autumn flowerers, only possible, however, if your garden is on lime-free soil. They are not difficult to grow and if you pay a little more for named forms from free-flowering parents, they will flower freely for you too. In the last crazy autumn I had spring gentians in flower in late September.

This type of gardening spans the world, as the AGS bulletins will teach you. My travels, my geography and my pleasure have been transformed by them in the past 60 years. They are a riposte to narrow bigotry about growing nothing but one’s own country’s “native” flowers.

Some of the finest alpines are now at risk in the wild as climates change: gardeners have a special role to play in keeping them alive. Beneath that snow blanket, I like to think my visiting Heffalump recognised this and left the sleeping beauties in peace.

Follow @FTProperty on Twitter or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram to find out about our latest stories first. Listen to our podcast, Culture Call, where FT editors and special guests discuss life and art in the time of coronavirus. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.