Cheyenne: Finishing touches to the Unfinished

Nature is the real boss here.

Monday's snow turned the surrounding topsoil to mud, halting my finishing the last rock bits. But that's OK, because this fall was an opportune if unplanned time to jam in the first plants!

 Yeah, "jamming" is what we young people will call planting from now on.

That's my jam.

The back bit, hidden against the building, will sit undone till next spring, but you'll see the little childsplay-river rivulet back there where I tested the grade and drainage so that snowmelt crashing off the glass roof can drain over the surface of a potentially frozen soil and escape from around the crevice garden.  You've gotta plan for this stuff unless your bad dreams aren't made of boulders, ice, snow, and cracking, like a season finale of Game of Thrones.

One of the great fortunes of this project is having access to not just gravel made out of the very stone we used, but different screened sizes, too.  So we did that thing which makes quarries and rock-shops raised their eyebrows: buy several different sizes and let them get mixed in the truck.

A bit of fun- they sort themselves again in a wheelbarrow if tipped just right.

As per my usual approach, the whole garden got topressed in an inch or two thick of 1/4" screen gravel (easy to dig into), which gives the look of a very steep and convoluted parking lot in-between all the big stones.  But that is what the odd sized gravel is for: "Nature-ifying." (in the spirit of stupid invented words)

An open-soil expanse to give foil to and break up the solid-stone areas.  

Let's have a look at the progress of Nature-ifying an area of flat, even gravel:

Flat, even gravel with a few outliers from the solid-stone areas.

Larger (1" - 1.5", or  2.5 - 4cm) gravel added unevenly: heavy in some areas, absent in others.

Stepped on. The faces of each gravel piece rock looks up now, which often happens on its own after a good winter. But the keen eye will see there is still a gap in size between the softball-sized chunks and the largest gravel.

So we throw in just a few, literally 3, which bridge that size.

Bang, done: "Naturified." Now we have to patiently let the plants grow up, for which we have no Millennial-generation shortcut.

Have I mentioned the pyrite, or "fool's gold." which is very visible on some of the stone's surfaces?  It's a conspiracy between sulfur and iron.

I learned a lot from the master gardeners: what they were growing in their gardens (and how it behaves), which will inform what plants I try next spring.

And I was also told what I'd sought to no avail- the name of this geologic member- 

"Sherman Granite."

Bare-rooting is the only way to plant manzanitas.   And in fall, too.

Beautifully grown by Kelly Grummons, this is our favorite, the Greenleaf Manzanita, Arctostaphylos patula, which certainly must occur in a certain rare corner of Wyoming.  This particular strain is a 2011 Utah collection by the Boulder, CO plantsman Allen Taylor.  

As I wrote earlier- here is how to know you are planting at the ideal time.  Roots in active growth! Look at'm grow!  They are preserved by a patient, gentle washing in bucket of water to get the potting mix mostly off.  We won't cry if there is a little bit of perlite clinging in still.

They don't look too bad against that stone.   I put them in this "ravine" to protect them, while young, from wind, and I'm curious how far out they will grow once settled in.  I've seen them hunkered down behind rocks in nature when on windy ridges.   They are not just here because I love manzanitas.  Well, in part.  Actually, they lend a good, rich green to the garden, visible from a distance. The sexy sexy rutile-red stems against the blue-purple granite is just a bonus.

Rhamnus pumila, a dwarf alpine buckthorn from the Alps, is promising for some amazing gnarled woody structure as well as, again, a supply of rich green, very visible at a distance (and useful aesthetically in this way).  I also feel that because it is deciduous, it will not suffer from the drying winter winds.  I'll let you know. 

It's one of my favorite plants going in.  There are three, and long-term hopes are that there will be both a boy and girl in that mix so that future mad plant fiends will be able to collect the fruit and grow more of them. Tell me: is there any real reason not to get plant-randy by a tiny tree which espaliers itself in limestone crevices?  Ooof!

Well, there is a bit of warm fall weather ahead, perhaps enough to let everything root in well before proper cold and winter.  I look forward to coming back and seeing you all in spring and finishing the garden.

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.)

Cheyenne: Master Gardeners to the Rescue

First, I did a little talk on Crevice garden history and examples around the world...

(photo courtesy of Shane Smith)

Then, we looked at the one here at the entry of the gardens, talked about its inception, which is mostly documented here on the blog...

And we talked bare-root-planting, which the Master Gardeners took to with finesse, helping me get most of the plants in the ground today, alleviating my worries about future cold weather.

The Master Gardeners must also be given credit for providing the grant which made this whole dang thing possible.  My thanks to them for this exciting opportunity, adding another stone in the crown of the Cheyenne Botanic.

Manzanita fans will be interested to know that I planted several here, and that today, on October the 3rd, the plants grown in pots were sending out phenomenally fast root growth; long, white to translucent extensions...  The ideal time to plant a plant is when it's internal clock says  "Roooooooot!"

So as to not break off too many of these finer roots, I delicately washed away the soil from the Manzanitas in a five gallon bucket to plant them and cover them with shade cloth for their first winter. It worked really well at APEX, so I'm doing it here.

250 plants at present, 101 species.  And this is just he first planting of 1/4 of the target plants...

Cheyenne Botanic: Man Proposes.

Cheyenne Botanic: A Marathon Unfinished

Day 6 at the Cheyenne Botanic.

We ran out of allotted time this week to build the garden, so I'll be back in October to finishing up rock-work.  I've resisted my usual strategies to "finish a job on time" as I often do in landscaping, as this is different- and I'm not willing to compromise the flow of this particular installation.  I think all we really need is a day, which we don't have- and that's fine- an excuse for another trip to beautiful Cheyenne!

Speaking of Wyoming: in several places in the garden, we gaps here and there between large stones, especially those that provide a silhouette, trying to make the mound look more broken up in an irresistible reference to Split Rock, Wyoming.

There are specks of Pyrite here and there in the big stones, but today we found a great fat chunk of fool's gold.

A friend, Sara, drove all the way up from Loveland two days to help out.  We began to top-dress in gravel and chips.  The whole things gets a blanket of 1/2"gravel, and flecked into it here and there we will use 3/4 and 1" screened gravels to truly make it look natural.

This garden is meant to push and pull against the open soil of the bed it's in- so there are open areas.  valley-like and prairie-like interactions between purely tight stone and open, plantable soil. Also, so the whole thing does not reveal itself to the viewer at first glance.  The largest incorporated open bed is visible on the lower left, where we've staged the fine gravel for now.   Softball-sized chunks around that open gravel bed, will, again, make it look more natural and less like a very poorly placed tiny parking lot.

Stay tuned for plant considerations and the riveting stoney conclusion...

Cheyenne Botanic: The Dance

Day 5 building a crevice garden at the Cheyenne Botanic.

Wishing we had steel-tip-gloves. 

The East/ Right-of-Entry piece.

At the beginning of the day, it wasn't much to see from the second-floor catwalks/skyway between the new and old greenhouses.  At the end of the day, it was slightly better than not much to see.

Me mastered the key to naturalistic rock work:  shards, chips, fines, and token desert trash.  

Here, Jacob is watering in the sandy fancy-mix. This is to settle it and eliminate air pockets. And to clean the faces off so we have the satisfaction of seeing how it looks before we go home after the day's work.

It's more visible from inside the conservatory than I expected- and it's through the dryland section. There was no accident that Shane used gneiss to edge the cactus zone.  And I'll be tempted, in turn, to use cacti and agave immediately outside those windows.

During the day, while I ripped out and re-oriented rocks we has spent much time setting, it was clear that indeed, like making an art piece, setting stones is a dance and balance between harmony and variety. Unity and disparity.  Sameness and difference.  A dance.  

Gosh my legs are sore.

Cheyenne Botanic: Rock on

Briliant Day 4 at Cheyenne Botanic:

Using a Sky Track Telescoping forklift (AKA dinosaur machine scorpion) with outriggers to deliver mixture far into the crevice bed.

I find that with every passing year of experience building rock gardens, 

my skill at estimating yardage and tonnage gets worse.

 A nod to the czechs and a generally good way to keep construction holistic:

Using a compass to orient the vertical crevices.

ZZ opines that linear stratification is only for sedimentary stone; but this volcanic stone naturally breaks off with a cleavage which is not technically strata, but still linear. 

Orienting pooches with treats.

I made intentional disparities with some big rocks to resolve with small rocks. Trying something new.

I tell ya, you really don't need sedimentary/metamorphic-layered stones like sandstone, slate, or limestone, to make crevice gardens.  I'll let you know when all is done, but I seriously think this, to work with, might be my new favorite stone of all time.  It has pink inclusions in the purple-blue, and we've been finding fun dendrites and glistening iron pyrite (fool's gold!) on some of the big rocks. 

A mix of sizes is critical.  Medium to  Large here.

 Toss in a little (and yes, actually just tossing it) small, varied bits immediately, staggeringly, sets it off to looking like a real rock outcrop. Tertiary cleavage was totally accidental: the lines you see running from upper left to lower right. They are an accidental result of having worked on a primary (at approx. 10 degrees NW orientation, pointing toward the viewer) and the secondary, approx. 50 degree angle of steep "cliffs" facing you.  Somehow this third angle showed up; perhaps it is born of the stone's internal (crystalline?) structure?

Primary/compass orientation is easy to see from above.

But we spent most of the day nearly finishing the satellite patch of crevice on the other side of the entry- to the right of the front doors and visible from the inside of the Orangerie; a dazzlingly-lit beautiful, rentable new space at Cheyenne Botanic.  The beautiful old production greenhouse, under current renovation, seen in the left background.

There's been another thing I'm doing differently. It's practical:  In order to get the right sizes of rock delivered to everywhere on the rockery, we've simply been dumping mixed-sized loads of rock on the very top of the half-made crevice garden.   This way, I have a pile on top from which to distribute: to bar. drag, and heave wherever I need it, which is always downhill! 

But perhaps more importantly, aesthetically, I've been channelling Susan-in-the-Pink-Hat's observation that there is much to be learned about a stone by the way it lands when it is piled or dumped. Certain natural angles of repose, like mineral tarot cards, reveal hidden secrets.  Many times, a stone has just landed in a fantastic way that I would not have though to place it.  So I work with that.

Charlotte was on front desk duty today.