New Views in the Landscape Crevice Garden Fundamentals

by Mark Dwyer

Ijust finished reading an amazing gardening book entitled The Crevice Garden by Kenton Seth and Paul Spriggs (Filbert Press, 2022). This is one of the few gardening books I’ve read cover to cover in many decades. This timely book topic allowed me to further explore this intriguing gardening style which, while trending and getting more attention in the past couple of years, already has a long history. While the installation of the crevice garden requires some “know how” and old-fashioned elbow grease, the end result is a beautiful and low maintenance garden.

My exposure to crevice gardens started a decade before reading this book. I recall visiting Allen Centennial Gardens, a 2.5 acre teaching garden on the University of Wisconsin (Madison, WI) campus when I first noticed something different. I tour this garden many times annually and remember first observing their new crevice garden, created by garden volunteer Ed Glover. Ed has a long history with alpine gardening in general and is an active member of the North American Rock Garden Society. This narrow crevice garden has a strong, architectural contribution with thin, parallel rocks jutting from the ground in a narrow, slightly mounded garden space in full sun. This crevice garden was a small portion of their already amazing rock garden but the proximity to the primary path and all the notable alpine plant treasures tucked in the nooks and crannies formed by the rock placement invited closer inspection.

Mark Dwyer is the garden manager at the Edgerton (WI) Hospital and Health Services Healing Garden, runs his own landscape consultation business and was the Director of Horticulture at Rotary Botanical Garden (Janesville, WI) for 21 years.

He has also been a frequent speaker at iLandscape.

In my more frequent, pre-COVID travels, I later sought out and stumbled upon crevice gardens at the Denver Botanic Garden, Chicago Botanic Garden, Cantigny Garden (Wheaton, IL), Plant Delights Nursery (Raleigh, NC) and many private settings. The large crevice gardens at the Montreal Botanic Garden and Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Garden Wisley blew my mind. This style of rock gardening, inspired by layers of sedimentary rock in the mountains, steppes and tundra, really intrigued me in terms of not only the design and plant materials but appreciation for the design and construction.

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