Blank slate garden opportunity

Rockwork can add interest to a garden or actually be the garden. This is the Crevice Garden outside the door to the Cheyenne Botanic Garden’s Grand Conservatory. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle May 19, 2023, Page A9, “Blank slate gives gardener myriad of opportunities”

Blank slate gives gardener myriad opportunities

By Barb Gorges

            Imagine this: a blank slate, a flat 12 by 40 feet of nearly bare dirt.

The dirt looks good, nearly weed-free. One long side is backed by concrete block wall painted black, so almost any plant by it will look good. A sidewalk edges the other long side and is backed by a red brick garage wall.

I’m a little jealous that Kim Parfitt has all that empty space without having to dig up lawn. I could fill that up in no time with one trip to a good nursery.

In fact, the Cheyenne Habitat Hero Committee is about to do that very thing as an extension to the Habitat Hero garden by the flagpole at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens. The extension’s outer perimeter is a 30-foot-long curve and figuring the square footage is beyond my geometry skills. But I think 72 new plants should do it.

Kim has something more interesting in mind. She wants some topography. She likes the crevice garden at the entrance to the CBG’s Grand Conservatory. Good news is that she has a wide gate between the garden and alley for delivery of large rocks, and probably a cubic yard or two of extra dirt she can haul from Cheyenne’s compost facility with her husband’s pickup. Shrubs can also offer some diversity in height.

Kim’s thinking about a groundcover, maybe clover, for a path for the dogs to wind through the topography. Unless it’s mowed to keep it from flowering, the bees attracted to clover might make it hazardous to walk barefoot, paws included. The compost facility has lots of wood chips for path making.

The very first step (which I have never taken, so my home garden looks like a patched crazy quilt) is to get out the graph paper and measure and draw the garden boundaries.

The next step is to figure out where the water faucet is and how to get water to potential plantings. The former owners of Kim’s house had set up plastic pipe along the black wall with four or five sprinkler heads to water the grass that used to be there, plus some drip irrigation tubing for a raised vegetable bed in the far corner.

My suggestion is to scrap all the old irrigation. It’s better to have soaker hoses running along the surface of the garden than to have the plants sprayed with water. Drip irrigation and soaker hoses mean less wasted water. Designing a system needs to go hand in hand with deciding where the plants and paths are going to be. There are people who design watering systems as a profession.

At the same time, Kim needs to think about what plants she is planting. With her experience teaching high school AP classes in environmental science, I’m guessing she’s thinking about native plants. But she might mix in some of her favorites and discover some water-wise exotic beauties among the natives from Plant Select offered at area nurseries and mail order from High Country Gardens.

The trick is to sort the plants by their needs. The ones that need the least water (after they’ve had plenty to get started) can be at the far end of the yard since Kim said the water pressure is poor that far from the faucet.

Identifying sunny and shady areas is important too. I’ve grown Rocky Mountain penstemon in the shade for 30 years and it blooms but then flops over. I moved some to a sunny location and it’s become a vigorous, bushy plant.

When Kim first described her new garden area, she said she needed to get it rototilled. But that’s no longer a given these days, even for vegetable gardening. If your vegetables need soil amendments, add them to the top couple of inches. There’s a whole community of helpful little soil microbes that die when you dig too much. Also, disturbing soil exposes weed seeds that use sunlight to germinate and then you’ll have more weeding to do.

I suggested to Kim when she’s buying perennial plants, pick smaller ones, in 2.5-inch pots instead of 1-gallon pots. After you gently shake the potting soil off the roots, you only need to slice open the soil with your shovel and insert them. The roots quickly reach out, whereas if you plunk in the whole root ball, potting soil included, the roots just circle around and around in that “cotton candy.”

This year, planting a few easy-peasy annuals can be instant gratification while the perennials get established. The first year, perennials sleep, says the old axiom. The next year they creep and it’s the third year they leap!

Rock for lawn

Beth Miller’s front yard is a rocky oasis for hardy plants and mental respite. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Published June 18, 2022, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.

Rock “lawn” blooms in Cheyenne neighborhood

By Barb Gorges

            I noticed one of my neighbors replaced her lawn with a rock garden a few years ago and recently she gave me a tour.

            Coincidentally, I knew the previous owner of the house, artist Elizabeth Nelson, then in her 80s, who had a conventional lawn and landscaping. The current owner is Beth Miller, whom I knew before she moved in.

            Beth started the transformation in 2010 in the front corner, planting a juniper shrub trimmed in the pom-pom style. Think of bonsai but with green balls at the ends of bare branches. Beth put in rocks to mark the border between the lawn and the mulch around the shrub.

            Then she decided to rock the whole front half of the yard. Initially, she was able to find “moss rock” with its interesting crusts of cryptogamic plants in town at Riverbend Nursery, then later expanded her rock purchases to Colorado.

Note: You must get permission to collect rocks on private land and you must check regulations for public land.

            Beth decided to rock the rest of the front yard, leaving a gravel path to wander across. When two enormous blue spruces were taken down in the backyard in 2017, more rock garden was created, along with a graveled play yard for the dogs.

Beth Miller’s backyard garden is built with stacked rocks. It’s a busy bird sanctuary. Photo by Barb Gorges.

            Small boulders and stacked rocks affect neighboring plants. Water runs off the rocks so plants get more water than they would normally. You can see this effect along highways where water running off the pavement makes the shoulders lusher than the nearby terrain.

            Rocks also absorb heat so perennial plants wake up earlier in the spring. But then there is more heat in the summer, so Beth has picked heat tolerant plants like yucca, agave, cactus, Mormon tea and other desert species as well as drought tolerant prairie perennials. Because of these species’ resilience, after she waters enough to establish new plants, she usually doesn’t need to irrigate at all.

            Like other gardeners, Beth enjoys the challenge of figuring out which plants to try where. The downside is that not every perennial plant makes it through the winter. This year Beth realized it was time to pull a couple yuccas growing too large too close to the sidewalk—those pointy leaves are dangerous. She’s hoping the remaining yucca will put up a 10-foot flower stalk like one of the others did last year. I made sure to walk the dog past Beth’s house when it was blooming.

            There are no boulders in the backyard—they don’t fit through the gate, but the stacked rocks create “Maggie’s Island,” named for the Corgi who enjoyed snoozing there in the sun. It is also the view from the dining room and kitchen windows.

            Beth has an artistic sense in the arrangement of rocks and plants, though she claims she’s more a crafts person than an artist. However, she does enjoy art and has been collecting work by a retired Colorado State University professor. He repurposes agricultural implements into benches including two Beth owns. He also made the fanciful snowmen from plow disks. The life-sized metal ravens come from an artist in Pennsylvania.

            Beth feels that the Mid-Century Modern architecture of our neighborhood’s homes is the perfect backdrop for her garden style. To set it off even more, she’s installed a corrugated steel fence at one side of the front yard. Something about it looks very organic when partnered with spikey plants.

            While Beth admitted that much of her gardening inspiration comes from Monty Don, the most famous gardener on British TV and easily found online, I’ve met other gardeners into either rocky gardening or spikey plants.

            Loree Bohl is the author of “Fearless Gardening: Be Bold, Break the Rules, Grow What You Love” and blogs at www.TheDangerGarden.com. Prickly plants are her favorites, too.

            Coloradoan Kenton Seth designed the crevice garden at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens and has a new book coauthored with Paul Spriggs coming out in August, “The Crevice Garden: How to make the perfect home for plants from rocky places.” His website is www.PaintbrushGardens.com.

            Starting a rock garden is a little more work and expense than most gardens. So Beth has the support of her family—as well as their muscles when they help with the heavy lifting.

            Her unique garden has been a place of respite for Beth, a place where she spends time in the morning before heading to work, sometimes even driving home at lunch for a few minutes more. And it’s a destination for all of us in the neighborhood to see what’s blooming next.

Panayoti Kelaidis to inspire Wyoming gardeners to go native Feb. 29

“Going Native: International plant explorer Panayoti Kelaidis wants to inspire Wyoming gardeners”

Published Feb. 9, 2020, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, https://www.wyomingnews.com/features/outdoors/international-plant-explorer-panayoti-kelaidis-wants-to-inspire-wyoming-gardeners/article_213c7e0a-9bc6-5de5-9130-d5521285bd47.html.

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6^th Annual Cheyenne Habitat Hero Workshop: “Rethinking Wyoming Landscaping – Native Plant Gardening 101”

Feb. 29, 8 a.m. – 4 p.m., Laramie County Community College

$25 fee includes lunch. Register by Feb. 27 at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/4463444, where the complete schedule can be read.

Questions: Mark Gorges, 307-287-4953, mgorges@juno.com.

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By Barb Gorges, with Niki Kottmann

Panayoti Kelaidis stepped out to pour us a couple cups of Ceylonese tea. While I waited, I noticed his office at the Denver Botanic Gardens has floor-to-ceiling shelves full of plant books for parts of the world he’s travelled to.

Numerous plaques and certificates on one wall commemorate his contributions to horticulture over a lengthy career. His latest accolade is to being chosen as a judge at this year’s Philadelphia Flower Show.

The windowsill features a parade of small, unique succulents and cactuses, part of Kelaidis’s extensive personal plant collection at his Denver home. I toured the nearly half-acre garden on the Garden Bloggers Fling last summer.

Kelaidis, senior curator and director of outreach for the Denver Botanic Gardens, will be the keynote speaker at the sixth annual Cheyenne Habitat Hero workshop Feb. 29.

            As part of his job at the gardens, Kelaidis leads plant tours to foreign countries, most recently Tibet. A tour of the Sichuan, China, planned for June will depend on world health concerns. It’s helpful he reads Chinese, having once been a student of the language.

Kelaidis is also enthusiastic about Wyoming, where he visited two favorite aunts as a child. In the 1980s, he also travelled our state for his native seed business. He likes to take people on plant tours to the Cody area. As the president-elect of the North American Rock Garden Society, he’s considering a future convention in Cheyenne—we have natural rock gardens nearby to show off.

Kelaidis’s plant knowledge is extensive, especially grassland and alpine species. He co-authored the 2015 book “Steppes, The Plants and Ecology of the World’s Semi-arid Regions,” about the four major steppe regions in the world, including the Great Plains. He also writes a blog called Prairiebreak, http://prairiebreak.blogspot.com/, and he established the Rock Alpine Garden at the Denver Botanic Gardens.

How does he describe himself? “Plant nerd” and a friend calls him a plant geek. I think he’s both. He’ll tell you he isn’t a garden designer, but I’d say he looks at an even bigger picture. And that is why he’s been invited to be the Habitat Hero workshop’s keynote speaker.

Kelaidis’s Feb. 29 talk, “Rethinking Wyoming Landscaping—Native Plant Gardening 101,” will echo Douglas Tallamy’s book “Bringing Nature Home.” Both it and Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” mark sea changes in our relationship to nature. Carson’s book, published in 1962, showed the devastation caused by indiscriminate use of pesticides, while Tallamy’s 2007 book showed us our conventional landscaping and gardening practices are detrimental to native insects, birds, other wildlife, and consequently, people. We need to plant native plants to support native insects, including native bees and butterflies. They are the foundation of the healthy ecosystems we enjoy and require.

At first, Kelaidis thought Tallamy was a little too radical, saying all ornamental plants from elsewhere needed to be replaced with natives. For many generations, the goal of landscaping and ornamental gardening has been beauty, Kelaidis said. But now he recognizes the other goal must be “ecological services.”

“We really need to figure out how to create a garden that is part of the natural system, not an obstacle,” said Kelaidis. Can that be beautiful? Can we shift the paradigm completely?

Can we make beautiful gardens with native plants? What we mean by “native” varies. For some American gardeners, it means the species originated on our continent, even if 3000 miles away. Or “native” for Cheyenne could mean any Great Plains species, or even just those from the prairie outside town.

Xeriscaping, gardening with less water, began about 45 years ago in the Denver area, Kelaidis said. With a growing population that could quickly run out of water, smart people realized changing from landscape plants popular in parts of the country with high rainfall to plants that need less water would help. The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities promotes this philosophy as well. Many of the more xeric plants are natives.

Kelaidis worked with the Denver Botanic Gardens and Colorado State University to help form Plant Select, https://plantselect.org/. The brand develops plants native to our high plains and intermountain region for the nursery trade. It makes it easy for gardeners to grow beautiful plants by planting those that love to grow here—and use less water. Although, Kelaidis said, there’s still room to grow the occasional prized non-native, water-hungry ornamental.

The water-wise and pollinator-friendly movements were combined a few years ago by Audubon Rockies’ Habitat Hero program. The five previous workshops in Cheyenne have been well-received. I think it’s because people enjoy doing something positive like gardening to support our environment.

After Kelaidis’s keynote address, “Rethinking Wyoming Landscaping – Learning from the Natives,” the workshop’s other presenters will walk attendees through the steps to take to make a Habitat Hero garden.

Talks will include how to protect and maintain natural prairie if you have some already, deciding on a location for a garden, removing unwanted plants whether turf or weeds, choosing plants, proper planting techniques, maintaining plants and gardens, and how to apply to be a certified Habitat Hero. The two hands-on components will be about how to install drip irrigation and how to use the winter sowing technique to grow native plants from seed (seeds, soil and containers included).

Panayoti Kelaidis checks out plants at Soapstone Prairie Natural Area in northern Colorado.

 

Rocky gardening

The Shinn garden in Ft. Collins, Colorado, features several rock garden areas. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Rocky gardening featured in Rocky Mountain garden tour

Published in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle July 14, 2019

By Barb Gorges

It’s always interesting to find out what is remarkable to visitors about your home or home garden.

In this case, the visitors were 83 garden bloggers/writers from 28 states, Washington, D.C., Canada and England. It was the 11^th annual Garden Bloggers Fling, this year headquartered in Denver mid-June. I was the first blogger from Wyoming to ever participate, qualifying because my Wyoming Tribune Eagle garden columns are posted to www.CheyenneGardenGossip.wordpress.com.

Cheyenne gardening is a little tougher than down in the “lowlands” of the Colorado Front Range, but we have more in common with those gardeners than anyone else. I saw lots of plants we grow here. Then I’d hear other visitors say it was either too hot back home, or too wet, for them to grow them. It made me appreciate my favorite prairie and mountain plants more.

In the weeks afterward, several of the bloggers wrote posts noting how rocky the gardens we saw were. It’s the fashion here.

One private garden we visited was planted around an installation of 600 tons of beautiful sandstone rocks stacked as low walls, waterfall, pond, grotto and retaining walls for a daylighted basement. It was an amazing property—and it can be yours for the listed price of $4 million.

The Maxwell garden in Boulder, Colorado, uses rock to create walls, waterfall, pool and grotto. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Looking through my photos from 21 stops over three days, I noticed how many rock gardens we saw, or crevice gardens—a subgenera.

I saw my first crevice garden at the Denver Botanic Gardens several years ago. I saw it again on this tour, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the one at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens now in extravagant bloom by the front doors of the conservatory. This is only the second year and it should be getting even more spectacular.

The crevice garden at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens was in full bloom at the end of June. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Many of the rocky gardens on the tour featured cactuses and succulents, low-growing mats of creeping plants and neon bright delosperma, or ice plants.

The cool thing about rock gardens is that when rain (or snow) hits them, the water runs off the rock and into the crevices where the plant roots are. The plants essentially get more water than if they were planted in a normal garden. Jake Mares, the CBG’s outside horticulturist, expects that our crevice garden, once fully established, will be able to make it solely on naturally occurring precipitation—no irrigation at all.

Rocks as part of landscaping have been around a long time. Sometimes they are even naturally occurring. Often today rocks are stranded in a sea of gravel or wood mulch which is quickly invaded by weeds—whether there is weed-barrier cloth underneath or not. It would be so easy to plant a ground cover that crowds out weeds instead, I think.

Pea gravel is popular around here as mulch because it doesn’t blow away. And it shares some water-concentrating properties that the rocks in a rock garden have. Certainly, weeds have adapted to gravel roads whenever there isn’t enough traffic to keep them down.

But there are problems with pea gravel. It sinks into the dirt eventually. Someone in the future is going to cuss when they dig to grow vegetables. But also, when it hails, your plant leaves are caught between a rock and the hard ice. A softer mulch, leaves or even wood, absorbs the hailstone impact, even if a leaf is in between. It also keeps the hail from bouncing high and hitting leaves twice.

Old leaves and other organic mulch decompose and feed the soil, gravel does not.

In addition to bringing in rocks, several Denver-area gardeners featured on the tour created hypertufa pots (see how to make your own with cement, peat moss and perlite, https://www.marthastewart.com/268962/hypertufa-pots). Many featured collections of cactus, agave and succulents. All are fine outside year-round with winter-hardy plants.

The Kelaidis garden in Denver is one of several to feature hypertufa containers. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Speaking of concrete, one of the most amazing structures I saw in a tour garden was an enormous, permanent, concrete-topped table. As if in a baronial hall, it was set for 12 for a Father’s Day celebration later. It was decorated with pots of branches hung with candles in glass globes. Down the center of the table was a trough where more candles floated. With steel table legs, it never has to be put away for the winter and never needs refinishing.

Next summer the Garden Bloggers Fling is in Madison, Wisconsin. My mother’s side of the family had a dairy farm there for over 100 years and I grew up nearby. I’ll get to see if Wisconsinites rock garden as much as we do.

Two of the Garden Bloggers Fling participants examine the rock garden in the Boulder, Colorado, front yard of Linda Boley. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Gardening with rocks

The quintessential rock garden has colorful carpets of alpine flowers, like this spot in Laramie County Master Gardener Wendy Douglass’s garden. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Published July 17, 2016, in the Wyoming Tribune Eagle Journey Section.

By Barb Gorges

Rock gardens became popular in the 1800s when tourists started visiting the Alps.

Travelers were enthralled by the tough but colorful plants growing on the rocky slopes and brought home alpine plant souvenirs.

It took a few decades to figure out alpine plants need gritty soil, rock and a cool climate to grow successfully. True alpine plants don’t need inches of compost or fertilizer.

Today’s rock gardens aren’t limited to cushions of small plants like the ones we see in our nearby mountains. There are plenty of other kinds of naturally rocky places to emulate.

Master gardener Wendy Douglass takes her cues from the nearby mountains and the prairie surrounding her rural Laramie County home.

The following is a tour of different rock garden styles and options seen through the lens of Douglass’ garden.

Wendy Douglass enjoys her mountain-style rock garden. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Mountain

In her backyard, Douglass has a conventional rock garden, emulating a group of rocks on a mountain side. On one side of it is a small waterfall that flows via recirculating water pump. On the other side, rocks have been arranged informally, leaving pockets to fill with soil and plants.

But since her yard doesn’t get as much water as the mountains, Douglass has arranged drip irrigation soaker hose throughout.

Another secret is that the base of the natural-looking pile of rocks started out as a pile of concrete blocks. No sense wasting purchased landscape rocks where they can’t be seen.

Johnny-jump-ups are welcome between the flagstones. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Patio

Normally, when laying a flagstone patio, one tries to get the stones to fit as closely as possible. But not if you are planning to plant it. Tough little plants were blooming in Douglass’s patio when I visited in June. They enjoy the sandy soil in the cracks. When it rains, the water pours off the flagstones and into the cracks, giving the plants more moisture than they would get in an ordinary garden setting.

Rocks, gravel, daisies and penstemon are part of Wendy Douglass’s prairie-style rock garden. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Prairie-style

At the front of Douglass’s house is a dooryard, or more pretentiously, a courtyard, protected on the west side by the garage and on the north side by a low wall. Much of it is planted as a prairie rock garden.

The topsoil Douglass brought in has been eroded by the wind over the last dozen years, leaving a gravelly surface like the real prairie. In fact, among serious rock gardeners, this might begin to qualify as a “scree garden” – emulating those mounds of gravel below the rock faces in the mountains.

Douglas has placed a few rocks among the plants, just as they might show up on the prairie—in fact, many come from elsewhere on the property.

However, this is a garden and so it is a souped-up version of the prairie—more flowers and the grasses tend to be ornamental. Plus, many prairie plants are much taller than the diminutive alpine plants of the traditional rock garden.

And it harbors another secret—an artificial boulder. Douglass and her husband experimented with a technique taught by an Australian company that starts with a pile of rubble covered with a concrete mix and then artfully finished with colored mortar dabbed on by brush.

Hypertufa containers are fun to make yourself, in whatever shape you choose. This one is in the Denver Botanic Gardens’ rock garden. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Trough

Similar to fake boulder-building, you can make hypertufa (lighter than concrete) troughs to display a particular collection of small rock garden plants. Multiple internet sites have directions.

Wendy Douglass was inspired by Japanese and Chinese concepts of rock gardens for this spiral. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Zen

Rock gardening took off in Europe and America in the 1920s and, based on the number of rocks installed by landscapers in local front yards, it continues to inspire people today. However, the Chinese and Japanese beat us to it by 1000 years at least.

But those gardens are more about emphasizing unusual rocks, not so much about plants. Douglass has what she calls her Zen garden, a tiny area protected by the house. The plants there can be pruned and shaped by Douglass, rather than the wind and the deer. Small rocks form a swirl on the ground. Sand can be raked in patterns as an act of meditation.

Nearby inspiration for your own garden

There are two fantastic resources close by, public rock gardens, where the plants all have nametags.

The Denver Botanic Gardens’ rock garden includes a shady section. Below, the garden is a mosaic of plants from rocky places all over the world. Photos by Barb Gorges.

The first is the Rock Alpine Garden at the Denver Botanic Gardens. Designed by Panayoti Kelaidis and established in 1980, it is anchored by real boulders and every pocket is stuffed with plants from rocky habitats around the world.

On the left is part of the well-established crevice garden at the Denver Botanic Gardens. On the right is another, newly established for the future steppe garden. Photos by Barb Gorges.

The newest form of rock gardening is here too, crevice gardening, installed by Mike Kintgen, the current curator. You know how freezing and thawing will cause rock to crack along parallel faults? These cracks, or crevices, can be simulated by laying flattish rocks on edge, stacked against each other. Gritty soil placed in the cracks is just perfect for rock plants. Their roots are protected while they spread mats of colorful flowers.

The rock garden at the Gardens on Spring Creek feature varieties of columbine in early June. Photo by Barb Gorges.

Closer to home is the Gardens on Spring Creek in Fort Collins, Colorado. Installation began there about eight years ago. Arrangements of locally quarried rock display a colorful assortment of heat-tolerant perennials that would do well here in Cheyenne.

A tiny species of chickweed (top) forms a carpet and columbine (above) gets a toehold in a rock pile in the Snowy Range. Photo by Barb Gorges.

My favorite rock gardens are tended by Mother Nature, up on the Snowy Range, especially along the trail that begins at Lewis Lake. The plants aren’t labelled, but at the Forest Service visitor center above Centennial you might find a copy of a book published by the University of Wyoming Extension, “Plants with Altitude.” It identifies high elevation plants that adapt well to gardens and that can often be found at local nurseries.

A word about collecting rocks and plants

Do not take home rocks you find out in the country without permission from the private landowners or permits from the public land managers.

It is illegal to remove anything from a national park—rock, plant or animal, dead or alive. Period. Wyoming’s state parks also do not allow the removal of rock.

Our closest forest, Medicine Bow – Routt National Forest, no longer makes permits available for removing landscape rock for home use.

The Bureau of Land Management’s Rawlins Field Office, which includes southeast Wyoming, allows rock collecting for personal use with stipulations. Only collect along roads and trails, only by hand (no heavy equipment or explosives) and only less than a pickup load. Otherwise, a contract is necessary.

Check local landscapers and rock companies to find out where they obtained their rocks, especially moss rock—the kind that has moss and lichens growing on it. It should have been bought from private landowners or bought via permit from public land. Quarried stone is less likely to have a shady past.

As for collecting plants, cross public lands off your list. Consider private lands only with landowner permission. But usually, the domesticated relatives found at local nurseries transplant better than wild plants. Check the North American Rock Garden Society website for specialty catalogs for rock garden plants.

Resources mentioned

–Denver Botanic Gardens, www.botanicgardens.org.

–Gardens on Spring Creek, http://www.fcgov.com/gardens.

—www.ArtificialRock.com.au

–North American Rock Garden Society, www.nargs.org: illustrated plant list, beginner instructions, recommended resources.

–“Plants with Altitude” by Fluet, Thompson, Tuthill and Marsicek, available through the University of Wyoming Extension.

The natural, alpine rock garden, mid-July: This one is located at 10,000 feet elevation in the Snowy Range in the Medicine Bow National Forest, west of Laramie, Wyoming. Photo by Barb Gorges.