Gardens
Peaks and troughs
Ursula Buchan
Such is the perversity of human nature, that most people, if set down to garden on a healthy moor, will conceive a passionate and unquenchable desire to cultivate roses, carnations and bearded irises. The same people, and I count myself amongst them, finding ourselves living on a belt of lime- stone, cannot resist the temptation to coax a camellia or pieris to a sickly, unthrifty existence.
That is why, when I was offered a stone trough, I could not contain my excitement at the prospect of isolating some lime hating alpines from the baleful influence of my alkaline soil. My pleasure was two-fold, for as every grower of alpines knows, the genuine stone trough is now as rare and sought after as Centre Court tickets on finals day.
The fault, if such it can be called, lies with the missionary zeal of Clarence Elliott, a nurseryman and plant-hunter who in the 1930s popularised the idea of the trough or sink as the proper receptacle for many difficult plants that would curl up at the mention of an ordinary garden soil. In these containers conditions could be so closely controlled and the plants' capri- cious wants so admirably cared for that success was almost assured. The result was that all over the country, sharp-eyed and covetous alpinists hauled troughs from fields under the eyes of bemused farmers, ransacked dumps, and rummaged in buil- ders' yards. The supply, never limitless, ran out, and gardeners have since been forced to make their own substitutes, using a mixture of sand, peat and cement stuck onto more modern glazed sinks or even poured into cardboard box moulds. The result, named 'hypertufa', bears as much resemblance to tufa rock as plastic does to leather.
My father's continual efforts on my behalf, to bring the conversation in the pub around to the recherché subject of finding and procuring a stone sink, surprisingly bore fruit. So it was that I found myself in a field in Oxfordshire, looking at a large and handsome Horton stone trough. What did I care that an archaeologist of the future might be rather puzzled to find a chunk of dark iron-tinted liassic limestone in an area of creamy-yellow oolite?
The farmer and his son, indulgently prepared to accept £25 for this, to them, worthless lump of stone, took their good nature further and offered to help us load it into a borrowed Land Rover, which act of kindness, when they later counted their strained muscles, they must rather have regretted. For the trough measured five feet long, more than two feet wide and was very, very heavy. Once home, distractions and the anti- cipation of difficulties left it tilted against a wall for more than a year, until one day my acquisition of suitable plants became so numerous that I enlisted the help of a local handyman.
He arrived, unfortunately, while we were away, so that I was prevented from Overseeing its placement in a semi-shaded Position outside the study window, a de- privation which I shall always regret, for not only would I have enjoyed the prospect of watching the trough sliding down the gardeR on rollers, aided by Mr S, his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, but I might Perhaps have had some influence on its Positioning. He built two stone plinths on Which to rest it but, with the instinct of adventurous asymmetry which is the hall- mark of the bodger, he did not align it equally. My husband, himself no mean bodger, in a fit of neurotic anxiety that his Children might pull half a ton of stone upon their toes, had ordered that the trough be cemented to its supports. It cannot now be moved. I am schooling myself not to notice.
It was the work of several moments to mix together an acid loam, begged from a friend, with large quantities of moss peat and quartzite grit, and a generous helping of bonemeal. The smell of peat, it must be admitted, hung in the air for several days, exhaling a breath of dear old Ireland into the study. The planting was sheer delight; primulas, alpine calceolarias, cassiopes, and alpenroses, such as I thought never to see in my garden, which have grown away With a determination and a flourish that leads me to suppose that they are fully patriated.
It is not perhaps always properly appreciated that many alpine plants do not Cling with the rugged tenacity of an Everest expedition to sheer cliffs and ledges, but are bog plants, for whom having their roots in a peaty moisture-retentive mixture is as much as they could wish. That is partly why so many alpines can be persuaded to flourish in humid, lowland gardens.
I am hoping that the iron content of the stone will, at least to some extent, neutral- ise the alkalinity of the limestone. The
growing medium, in any event, is as peaty as an Islay malt whisky. If the leaves of Rhododendron impeditum turn the colour of a birch in autumn, I shall be forced to line the trough with zinc, but that is a course of action requiring such dexterity as to be contemplated only in a matter of horticultural life or death.
In case I should be thought boastful, and after all tomorrow may bring the untimely death of all the occupants and with them my best hopes, I must say that I regard the trough as a monumental piece of good fortune. There are people far more expert than myself who would do anything, stop- ping only just short of criminality, in order to possess such a thing. For an unworldly creature such as myself, it represents the peak of earthly ambition.
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