Cheyenne: Why don't we add another?

The stones are fine from the front, the first viewing people will see.

Behind the garden (upper right) we see the catwalk leading to the old solar production house under renovation (upper left.)

Yeah, the front is fine.

But the area behind it abruptly becomes open soil/no rocks/future garden along the west face of the conservatory.  Note the stockpile of stone on the mid-right, crevice garden on far right, lumber in-between.

 

We piled up the rest of the rocks next to the unfinished garden so it would be close for me to grab from.  And I had a look at the garden from this angle, seen from that second-story catwalk.

But a new lesson emerged from just seeing the stock pile. (Susan Sims noted that observing how stones land when just dumped helps understand how they want to fit together)

This lesson here is just that the garden looks much more integrated into the bed/soil/path when the presence/volume of rock continues, dribbles away if you will, to that open bed, past the corner of the building.  The Crevice Garden's profile, generally, too, looks better with this "extension."  A hard, basically strait-edged boundary of the crevice garden at the building corner (incidentally marked with lumber here) was about to look very rigid, very formal and fake.  Instead, crevice invades perennial bed and perennial bed invades crevice bed, like the black and white dots in the yin-yang symbol.  A nice way to marry to very different surfaces of garden.  I wish I could take credit for that idea, but it was an accident of where a pile of rocks landed.

Now, upon that little revelation, next spring I have to exhume and then arrange those stockpile stones right where they sit.  Having the ability to make little changes in direction when opportunities arise has made the crevice garden at Cheyenne botanic one of my favorite projects of all time.

(An Agastache which came up in the botanic's compost heap was mercifully spared the snow/frost and brought into the staff breakroom; a delight to see when I came in to raid the coffeepot.)