Anchorage Daily News

Like many women, Carmel Tysver wanted a big rock for her 26th wedding anniversary -- 2 tons of it, actually, piled on a trailer and dragged by a protesting pickup up and over the high mountain passes from Brisco, British Columbia, deep in Canada's East Kootenays, to Anchorage.

Such is the passion of rock gardeners.

In the nine years since she and her husband paid their romantic call on the Wolfenden family rock farm, Rocky Mountain Tufa Ltd., that big load of tufa, a porous form of limestone, has nurtured and sheltered hundreds of tiny Alpine plants in brilliant skirts around the Tysver home.

Any rock can be used for a rock garden, which is different from a garden that happens to have a lot of rocks (generally considered undesirable) or a rockery, where the rocks, not the plants, are front and center. In fact, broken pieces of ceramic, concrete, even bird baths, can be used to make a rock garden, though purists tend to prefer one type of rock at a time as truer to nature.

But rock gardeners don't use rocks because they're enamored of rocks per se. Rather, they adore the intriguing, lovely and mostly high-altitude plants that have to snuggle against a brute of a boulder to live.

TINY BUT BEAUTIFUL

Jaime Rodriguez, owner of Alpine Garden Nursery in Wasilla, says the point is to create an environment in which high Alpine plants not only will survive but thrive at our lower elevations.

"Alpine plants are so tiny," he says. "They like their roots growing down next to the rocks, rocks buried a third to two-thirds of the way below the surface."

Rodriguez's rock garden stair-steps up a sunny south-facing cliff, with terraces of stone paths and conveniently placed rocks for sitting and admiring his miniature marvels: the Sedum kamtschaticum that blooms in showers of gold; Sedum rosea, or roseroot, with its royal purple heart; a winter-hardy red sempervivums that flowers in brave center spikes; the silver-rimmed Saxifragas and the mossy Saxifragas (some Alaska natives); the Zizia aurea, the golden-Alexander; dainty primroses like the Primula denticulata, the drumstick primula, that cautiously pokes up a golf-ball round of flowers before the snow is gone, then joyfully springs toward the sky; shiny species tulips, Tulipa tarda, glittering like fresh-minted doubloons.

Every week, every day, his garden stirs and changes, says Rodriguez, and since he took care to place his rocks right, he always has someplace to stand or sit to keep up with his 1,100 different species of plants.

A SLOW START

At this point, he can't always tell you what one is. "Magpies steal the tags," he says ruefully.

Magpies can be a real pain for Alaska rock gardeners trying to keep up with their prizes. Some like Florene Carney of Wasilla have beaten the birds by marking flat rocks instead of using the easily plucked-up plastic tags.

The usual bete noir for Alaska gardeners, moose, don't seem to have much appetite for the wee plants; it's their cloven hooves with 1,200 pounds atop that can trample a specimen Saxifraga into guacamole.

If you start with Eden, rock gardening is a Johnny-come-lately. Not many people traveled for fun before the 18 th and 19 th centuries, but trade and the industrial revolution made the Grand Tour the rage for a new leisure class. They went to Italy. They went to Spain. They went to the Alps. They saw bewitching miniscule plants nestling on rocky screes and floating great rafts of color down mountainsides and dug them up and sent them home to the rich soil and rain of Northern Europe, particularly, England. And the plants repaid them by dying in droves.

Only in the mid- to late 19 th century did garden writers start pushing the idea that success with Alpines depended on re-creating their Alpine environment. The Germans and the French were writing with charm and authority about rock gardening, but the British outnumbered them and added a tone of memorable waspishness, especially Reginald Farrer, who spent much of the early 1900s railing against what he called the "almond-pudding," the "dog's grave" and the "devil's lapful" styles.

"Few do rock gardening well," says Barbara Miller, senior horticulturist of the Alaska Botanical Garden. "They pile up earth and stick rocks here and there in a circle or an oval or some other geometric form, and it looks like something you'd drive a 4-wheeler over."

HOSES AND PLANTS

The ABG has three older, established rock gardens and five or six smaller ones, including those in supertufa troughs, she says. The Alaska Rock Garden Society, which mentors the plants, labels them, and those that prove themselves here are propagated from the garden and sold at the nursery.

Those wanting a rock garden should start with their garden hoses, Miller says. "Lay out the area and get the right proportion and size for the house," she says. "Too many people make their beds too small and regular; they should be curvy and irregular, as in nature, with different-size rocks spaced unequally."

Her advice is in line with that of James Bissland and the two styles he wrote about in "Common Sense in the Rock Garden": the architectural, or structural style, with pavement plantings and planted walls, and the naturalistic style, which consciously duplicates a piece of nature.

NOT TOO WET

No style, however, will make up for bad drainage. Anchorage author and gardener Verna Pratt says most rock garden plants are from dry and wind-chapped areas, which is why the plants stay short. They can't abide wet shade, so for those without hillsides, building a berm is the way to go.

The Alaska Rock Garden Society used river rocks and chunks of broken concrete to underpin the ABG rock gardens, then topped that with a coarse mix of sand, gravel and topsoil.

"Rock garden plants want moisture but not wet," says Pratt. "They need water. They just don't want to sit in it."

Some, she says, don't even like being rained on. In rainy Britain, some rock gardeners rig little parasols over such plants to spare them a single drop.

'A SERIOUS COMMITMENT'

In a state full of rocks, would-be rock gardeners need to be discreet about collecting. Pratt says Alaska State Troopers can react negatively to those loading the car trunk from falls along the Seward Highway, and buying rocks from quarries or sand and gravel companies can get pricey fast. The soil should be coarse and poor; Pratt top-dresses with gravel to make the beds look neater and keep the soil warmer.

Jewel-like rock gardens can be grown in porous troughs of hypertufa, which Tysver introduced to Alaska after seeing them in Stockholm. The troughs are made from a mix of peat moss, polypropylene fiber, perlite and cement, "and you better like getting dirty," says Tysver, who molds them in her garage.

As for plants, the ABG has a good home-grown selection; Rodriguez's nursery has seedlings both hardy and rare; and aspirants can hardly do better than join the Alaska Rock Garden Society, which teems with helpful members who swap plants among themselves and hold sales in the spring.

Rock gardening seems a pleasure formed by experience, appreciated most a little later in life.

"Rock gardeners tend to be avid and active," says Rodriguez. "They all love gardening, they're knowledgeable and experienced, they love learning -- and they all have a pretty serious commitment to pretty things."

And Tysver's anniversary rock? The biggest one? It weighed 450 pounds. That's a lot of love.

Cheryl Chapman can be reached at cchapman@adn.com.

Reading about rocks

Books on rock gardening must number in the thousands, but these three will provide enough information and delight for most purposes:

• "Pleasures & Problems of a Rock Garden," by Louise Beebe Wilder (Hartley & Marks Publishers, 1998). Wilder (1878-1938) remains one of the most deliciously quotable and authoritative of all garden writers. And Sia Kaskamanidis' black and white illustrations are a treat.

• "The Rock Garden and its Plants: From Grotto to Alpine House," by Graham Stuart Thomas (Sagapress / Timber Press, 1989). Yes, that Graham Stuart Thomas, British horticulturist, artist and famed collector and promoter of old and new shrub roses (David Austin named one of the most charming yellow roses in the world after him). But he had a side passion -- rock gardens -- and his writings here range from history to how-to's. The numerous black and white photographs are supplemented with full-color botanical plates.

• "Rock Garden Plants: A Color Encyclopedia," by Baldassare Mineo (Timber Press, 1999). Mineo's lush book is packed with more than 1,300 color photos of individual plants with their Latin names, common names (when they have them) and what each will need to thrive. A treasure.

-- Cheryl Chapman

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