In my alpine bed I have five Narcissus bulbocodium blooming. There's nothing terribly special about these dainty daffodils with their egg-yolk-yellow cones, but it's the first time they've flowered for me, so I find myself going out to inspect them three or four times each day.
I also have 18 furled buds on a Gentiana acaulis, and in the next couple of weeks they'll open into a little colony of deep-blue, upturned trumpets - like a miniature forest of HMV gramophones. Trouble is that the slugs and snails like nothing better than rolled-up trumpets for dinner, but since I nabbed 37 of the critters the other night, I reckon we're safe for a while. So far I have only 26 different plants in this tiny alpine garden, so I'm no more than a rank novice. Real alpine gardeners have hundreds and thousands of plants. Still, I think I've cracked one of the essential characteristics of a successful alpinist or rock gardener: an obsessive interest in numbers.
Alpine gardeners are forever (well, nine times out of 10) counting, cataloguing and listing their little charges. And that is perfectly understandable, because alpine plants are the jewels of the garden, and being so, they induce compulsive inventory-taking in their owners.
But unlike the static gemstones, pearls and gold that we keep nicely buttoned up in velvet boxes, alpines are performing treasures - with a repertoire of colourful tricks to lure us right into their inches-high world. Some, like many of the saxifrages, cover their tight, wind- and drought-resistant foliage entirely with shimmering, perfect stars. Others, the pleiones, for instance - or terrestrial orchids - erupt in spring from shiny, green bulbs into flamboyant pink affairs with five winged petals and a fringed tube whose corrugated and spotted innards draw you in for a closer view. And some, like the gentians, produce flowers of such pure, concentrated colour that they make your eyes sing. Or, as the 19th-century botanist, Thomas Corry, put it when applauding the Burren's Gentiana verna: "Blue - blue - as if the sky let fall/ a flower from its own caerulean wall."
But the most common stunt pulled by many of these horticultural pets is the one where they keel over dead without so much as a blink. Only the white plant label remains as a sad little tombstone. (My base beginner's heart was encouraged to learn recently that the well-known Northern Irish rock gardener, Harold McBride, collects a full bucket of defunct labels each year.)
Alpine plants are a special challenge for Irish gardeners with our rainy, mild climate and soggy wintertime soil. True alpines, with their close-knit leaves and short, brilliant flowers, are adapted to grow high up on mountains in thin stony soil, where the winters are hard and long, the summers short, and where the spring brings nutrient-rich snow-melt washing down the slopes.
Obviously we can't recreate the high-mountain weather, but we can ensure really good drainage with a mix of equal parts grit, good soil and peat (or peat substitute) - a recipe that will suit many alpines. And we can keep the necks of the plants dry - and thus prevent rotting - by mulching around them with more grit. And we can mimic the spring flood of nourishment by feeding plants annually with bonemeal, pelleted chicken manure or liquid tomato food. But even with such care there is still a high proportion of fatalities, which is discouraging for gardeners of perennials and shrubs - far less finicky subjects. So to avoid frustrating disappointment, the thing to do is to start off with a few easy, inexpensive alpines. You will kill some (I have my own mini-collection of gravestones) and you will bring some to glorious flowering.
"Easy" alpines include varieties of the low, mat-forming, north American phloxes, Phlox subulata and P. douglasii, some of the saxifrages, the succulent sedums, the smaller penstemons and campanulas, and all kinds of dwarf Dianthus, the relatives of garden pinks and carnations.
But don't take it from me. Ask the experts. And it just so happens that the experts - including a number of specialist nurseries - will be on hand at the Alpine Garden Society's annual shows in Cabinteely next Saturday and in Antrim a fortnight after that (see below). Also present will be a gathering of the most blueblooded alpine plants in Ireland, in pristine pots, impeccably groomed and flowering like crazy - a tribute to their guardians' patience and skill.
Alpine royalty to look out for are the "cushion plant", Androsace vandellii from the high mountains of Europe, which blankets itself in white flowers (providing that it has been protected from aphids, winter wet and summer drought and is turned regularly to get even amounts of sunlight) and the dwarf shrub Daphne petraea "Grandiflora", a similarly tricky individual with pink scented flowers. Plants like these fill beginners like me with a respectful awe - but it helps to remember that their growers have left a long trail of plant corpses in the pursuit of such gems.
As any expert will tell you, even if you kill three out of four plants you're over 50 per cent of the way towards being a real alpine gardener (in nine out of 10 cases).
