From the mountains to your garden...

Alpine Plants: Ecology for Gardeners. By John E. G. Good and David Millward. 2007. Batsford, London. 176 pp. ISBN 0 7134 9017 9.

One of the most fascinating things about plants, regardless of where they are from, is how these non-thinking, non-mobile entities manage to cope with all the vicissitudes that nature throws at them; survive, and reproduce insuring their continued presence in the world.

When a book comes along that promises to explain the how’s and why’s—and to connect it to what we do in the garden? It’s a candidate for “must have” status.

Rock gardeners have known forever that alpine plants are not like other garden plants. From the early days when plants were brought back from mountain expeditions to be grown in vastly dissimilar surroundings in our backyards, gardeners knew they had to do things differently. To grow these plants successfully required some knowledge of the conditions they endure in the wild…and a suite of techniques to help them in our gardens.

My favorite book about rock garden plants is Christian Korner’s, Alpine Plant Life: Functional Plant Ecology of High Mountain Ecosystems. It is, admittedly, not always easy-going for a layman. A neat compilation of hundreds of scientific studies, it covers the waterfront and was a real eye-opener and a major educational experience. It is NOT a book about how to grow—but teaches more than any such volume.

My main concern for the present work was that the book would wind up being a watered down restatement of Korner’s classic. It is clearly an attempt to take Korner’s work down a notch or two and make it more accessible to those of us in the garden.

At the outset, the authors doff their loden caps to Korner, whose presence lurks throughout the book, but confess their desire to go a step further--to use all this knowledge to help us better cultivate alpine plants. They encourage us to do this by thinking of plants in relation to their environment, both in the context of their living communities and their interaction with the non-living components of the environment.

Climate, soils, nutrition, reproduction, bio-geography and the effects of a changing environment are covered in both books. Korner’s work is more detailed and better footnoted (for further reading); Good’s is easier to work through.

Disconnecting your brain from the every day experience of your garden is important for gaining the best advantage from the book. Thinking of the plant as something more than a “pot-to-spot” garden inhabitant will help you make the connections between the real world lives of these plants and the Disneyland of our gardens.

Much of it involves logic and common sense. Annuals are less common in alpine environments (and therefore there are less annuals for us to put in our rock gardens) because…the season is too short for them to complete their entire life cycle. Alpines require perfect drainage because….the soils at high elevations are largely mineral and of relatively large particle size because there is less opportunity for weathering and breaking down of the rock at the top.

These and other revelations help cement awareness of why certain rock garden horticultural techniques have come to be (and why they help us succeed with alpine plants); along with plenty of grist to assist in the development of new ideas of what and how and why.

Read about respiration and you’ll realize why so many high-elevation alpines are nearly impossible to grow at lower elevations. You may save a dollar or two on your next nursery trip. Learn about why diseased plants in the wild often survive, albeit in altered form, while those in our garden succumb. Understanding the often DAILY freeze-thaw cycles in the Andes may give you some ideas about why we can’t grow these plants to save our souls.

Good’s list of humid summer vs. summer drought mountain ranges is a one page answer to why we need to know where our plants come from—and how we can better choose the plants we grow to match the climate we’re trying to grow them in.

A chapter on geology, one of the main differences between this book and Korner’s, is instructive, but a little too removed from the main interest. Both books would have been improved by more emphasis on alpine land formations and habitats, how they function, and the plants that are characteristic of each of them. Screes, moraines, alpine meadows and bogs, fell fields, tundra, cirques and other niches are probably more important to most gardeners than how rock is formed.

It was especially interesting to learn that nitrogen from car exhaust (from which no plant community is immune anymore) may be threatening delicate alpine environments, favoring plants that respond to nitrogen, as opposed to many alpines which are relatively unresponsive. The responsive plants gain a competitive advantage, and species diversity is reduced—as the alpines we value as garden plants lose out.

There are some disturbing glitches, as when the authors cite a study referred to in Korner’s book and mistake temperature intervals and specific temperatures,

"Korner quotes research by Munn, et al. (1978) in Montana, which showed that at 2,300 metres (7,545 feet) elevation, soil temperatures at 50 cm (20 in) below the soil surface were nearly 5C (41F) lower under forest, compared with adjacent grassland during the summer."

Korner’s book uses the term “5K”, indicating an interval, and making it clear that there is a 5 degree difference. A five degree difference on the Centigrade scale is 9 degrees F., NOT 41F (which is, incidentally, how cold it is outside when the thermometer reads 5C.)

The same mistake is made several lines later, equating a 1-2C mean air temperature difference to a 34-36F difference, when it is actually far less; and later referring to a 22C rise in temperature as the equivalent of a 70F change. The mistake occurs repeatedly throughout the book and was annoying.

There is also the passing of time, however, and Good’s book has the benefit (over Korner’s) of several years of additional research into the processes of survival, growth and development of alpine plants—a field which seems to be attracting more attention as the effects of climate change are debated. Alpine habitats are a little like canaries in a mine and will be among the first to show any change caused by worldwide climate alteration. Tree lines and species inventories will be watched closely…along with the movements made by plant populations trying to escape changes to which they can’t adapt.

These same changes will make the years ahead more challenging for alpine gardeners. It will take all the creativity we have to continue to grow the plants we love. Books like this one are a vital and necessary aid to understanding the biology of high mountain plants.

Good and Millward succeed in their primary goals. They lay out many of the challenges that alpine plants face in their struggle for survival; they analyze many of the adaptations the plants have evolved to succeed; and they discuss how awareness of this knowledge can help us grow alpine plants in our gardens. On the last point I had hoped for more. What’s presented is all good, but I got out of my chair wishing that the authors had continuously extrapolated the results of study and anecdotal observation back into the crevices and rockscapes of my garden.

Put Alpine Plants: Ecology for Gardeners on your shelf next to Korner. It will never replace the older work, but is a compentent, accessible introduction to the topic, sure to get you thinking about the plants in your garden.

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Copyright  2006- 2007 by Carlo A. Balistrieri.
All rights reserved.