Portraits of alpine plants

Introduction

Welcome to the website!

I have been growing alpines (rock garden plants), and other related plants since 1970, and over the years have bought thousands of plants; mainly from mail order specialist nurseries, as well as personal visits to those nurseries. I have bought plants from Alpine Garden Society plant stalls, and have been given plants by friends and other alpine plant enthusiasts. I have grown many from seed, collected from remote and wild mountain regions in many parts of the world, sometimes by donating in a share of various plant hunting expeditions where I have often received seeds of plant species new to cultivation.
I have had great success and enjoyment with the majority of these plants I have acquired, but I have also had the inevitable losses and failures, and testament to this is a large glass jar filled with ‘dead labels’; which I keep on a top shelf in the garage, in the optimistic hope that I may be able to place some of them next to a new plant; and try again!

I have bought very few plants from local garden centres or DIY gardening sections, as the choices that are available in these are very limited, and are just the “tip of the iceberg”. They usually offer just the standard, easy, more common plants, and whilst many of these are certainly worthy of a place in any rock garden or stone trough, you will have to seek out some of the specialist alpine plant nurseries to obtain some of the more elusive and rarer gems. But having said that, and at the risk of sounding contradictory, there have been the few occasions when I have called in at a garden centre for plant labels or potting grit, and have been pleasantly surprised by unexpectedly coming across an alpine gem amongst the hotchpotch of common every-day rock plants. This doesn’t happen very often, but is most rewarding when it does.
Many of the plants that I grow or have grown, have been recorded on 35mm slides using firstly a Pentax ME Super SLR camera and then later with a Minolta Dynax 3xi SLR camera; and whilst it is nice to view these pictures projected onto a 2 meter wide screen, there is quite a lot of hassle involved in setting things up to view the slides. I have therefore had very many of the better slides copied onto disc, so that they can be easily viewed on my TV and computer. I have also dispensed with taking any more pictures on 35mm slides and have now updated to a digital SLR camera.
I thought it might be nice if I could share some of these pictures with others; hence the development and launch of this website – I do hope you get some enjoyment from it, and find the contents interesting and informative. All the plant photographs shown on these pages, (unless otherwise stated) are of plants grown in the open in my own garden over the past 46 years.

Many of the pictures in the 'Portraits of Alpine Plants' page have a ‘mouse-over’ function where you can view a close-up or different view of the plant by moving the mouse cursor over the picture.. . . As you can with the two pictures shown below.

The website will be continually updated with newer pictures when they become available, so do please look here often.

I do hope you find much of interest in these pages, and should you wish to comment on any relevant subject, or just share you experience in growing alpine plants or ask a question, I welcome you!
You can contact me by using the form below. You will have to type the Verification No. . . this is to help prevent spam bots filling up my in-box with unwelcome rubbish!