If this is the first time you’ve come across the phrase “crevice garden,” it won’t be the last. This style of gardening is on the tongues of every gardening taste maker I know and is an approach to gardening whose time has come. Crevice gardens bring together a number of elements that make them must-haves in the modern garden. They are water wise, architecturally striking, perfect for small gardens and containers, and provide ideal conditions for growing a wide range of beautiful and unusual plants. Most critical, it is a style of gardening that not only brings a striking, fresh aesthetic to the garden, it also provides ideal conditions for a wide range of plants and helps them survive whatever extremes our climates throw at them. So whether you garden in steamy North Carolina, high-and-dry Denver, or frigid Maine, crevice gardening will work for you and allow you to grow a wide range of fascinating plants.
The concept of a crevice garden is deceptively simple: It is just a series of large, flat stones set together vertically like the pages of a book, with soil between each stone, making a series of narrow, deep crevices for your plants to grow in. As plant roots begin to grow out, they hit the stones and are guided downward, plunging deep into the structure of the crevice. So instead of a wide, shallow root system, you get a deep, drought-resistant one that’s insulated from extremes of heat and cold. At the same time, the structure of a crevice garden lets water drain quickly away from the soil surface, so the crowns of plants like alpines and hardy succulents stay dry and thrive in rainy climates where they would usually rot out.
A crevice garden gives you those magical “moist but well-drained” conditions you always
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