North American Rock Garden Society
Newsletter
Editor Marisca Sniscak

Why "Rock"?

By Nicholas Klise

Why is rock gardening called "rock"? What is it that always requires this particular mode of gardening to have such a peculiar modifier? Usually gardening is accepted on its own terms without any modification. Obituaries say "she was a gardener" and leave it at that. We assume that the deceased grew plants-maybe petunias in coffee cans, maybe tomatoes, maybe perennial flowers, maybe trees-but it really doesn't matter because all modes of gardening can be generalized under the umbrella of the conventional and traditional terms by which we reckon gardening. Rock gardening stands apart as one always has to say the word "rock."

It is an unfortunately confusing modifier for the word "garden," but unfortunately we are going to have to live with it as there is no alternative. Even if one were to come up with a better and more descriptive term, how would that word supplant a recognized phrase that has been in coinage for more than one hundred and fifty years?

From the very beginning of the nineteenth century when improved transport allowed plant collectors access to remote regions, gardeners realized that most of these unfamiliar plants required gardening techniques different from those employed up to that time. The first mountains that Europeans explored for plants were their own Alps, the root of the word "alpine" that means the "environment of mountains. " The most conspicuous element of the landscape in which floriferous, small plants grew was the exposed rock. Consequently, there was an immediate connection between these alpine plants and the rock in which they flourished. Growers who attempted to cultivate these alpine plants in low elevations very quickly figured out that there was a connection between rocks (or at least, soil) and success. Pioneers in this new type of gardening displayed plants with exposed rock as a way of defining this gardening technique as distinct from growing vegetables or common flowers, for example.

There is little evidence that having exposed rock piled somewhere in the garden will assure one success in growing plants. To the nineteenth century horticulturist, this rock pile was more symbolic--a mark of a sophisticate who was a citizen of the world (or, at least of Europe) and was the most progressive, up-to-date gardener (or pretended to be.) Charlatans dismissed the growing of alpine plants altogether and just opted for an elaborate display of rocks. Even today there are extant rock piles on British estates that bear witness to this early phase of rock gardening. By the end of the nineteenth century the term "rock gardening" was both firmly established in the vernacular and perversely confusing, as it remains today. At the end of the twentieth century, there were world-wide clubs that celebrate this distinct type of gardening. However, the general public, and people who call themselves gardeners, haven't a clue as to the meaning of the term, particularly to the word "rock."

In 1929 Sir William Lawrence met with a few enthusiasts in London with the intent of starting a rock garden society. These people were real horticulturists and immediately started to debate the terms by which this new club would be defined. At first the ones who had grown up with the term "rock garden"-let's call them the rock contingent-insisted that that the term was legitimate and self explanatory. The more horticulturally inclined protested that the term was vague and misleading since there was ample evidence that middle class pretenders had debased the term by piling rocks together without the slightest interest in, or knowledge of, horticulture. The "hort" contingent won the argument and proclaimed that the club would be called the Alpine Garden Society. The rockers protested that they were interested in much more than alpine plants. The name became engraved on "stone" as the Alpine Garden Society.

It is true that the term "alpine" seems limited, but, with its usage expanded to be a substitute for "mountain" it does make more sense. After all, mountains contain many habitats including deserts, meadows, bogs, fens, dark forests, sunny screes, aquatic areas, glacier-fed moraines, tundra, and rocks-lots and lots of rock. As our knowledge of the world became manifest, it became apparent that not only were there many habitats (and plants) but that there were different kinds of mountains-strikingly different from the Alps. The mountainous hinterlands of China contain a universe of plants, but this region is markedly different from the Appalachians, the mountains of Turkey or Central Asia or those of New Zealand. When one realizes this, the term "alpine" seems as ill-defined as the term "rock."

Similarly, gardeners have trouble with the term "hardy plant." Although most of the plants we are interested in growing are hardy, it is useless to use the term "hardy" in defining our rock garden plants because that term, unfortunately, has another meaning. The term means that a plant is not tender. By the turn of the nineteenth-twentieth century it also came to represent a style of gardening. This gardening concept of the use of hardy plants rather than tender exotics grown under glass was a revolution against the Victorian modus operandi; however it has now become standard practice. The word "hardy" carries with it the weight of this history and, with regard to a kind of gardening, implies ornamentation of the landscape using trees, shrubs, and perennial flowers that can be grown without any special protection. Coincidentally, that term evolved about the same time that that rock gardening was becoming popular. This is not exactly rock gardening; rock gardening concerns itself with more than this.

A few years after the Alpine Garden Society was formed, the pendulum swung back to the "rock" contingent with the formation of the Scottish Rock Garden Club and the American Rock Garden Society. Perhaps these new organizations used the "rock" word to emphasize their independence from England. They really had no choice because, ambiguous as it is, there is no other term that describes this mode of gardening.

There is something to be said for this ambiguity in that it is both inclusive and exclusive. North Americans (and maybe Scots) may find the word "alpine" limiting whereas "rock" sounds ambiguous. It is exclusive in that only those who distinguish "garden" as a noun from "garden" as a verb can hope to come to terms with the word "rock." Those who think gardening involves buying annuals from a garden center in the spring and spreading a few bags of mulch will never, ever comprehend the universe that can be seen through the lens of rock gardening. Forget these people; they will never be a member of the club. The word is inclusive because, to the cognoscenti after all, it encompasses the whole world; the entire planet is a rock. The English flower gardener digging manure into a perennial border, the Midwestern farmer plowing a corn field or the backyard gardener digging a hole for a rose bush probably will never understand that the soil they are working with is but an infinitely tiny layer upon a gigantic lump of rock.
If one is interested in growing plants from all over the world, or is interested in one genus in all its forms, or one type of ecosystem as it exists in various places, or is interested in the wild plants that inhabit the regions near home, then one has to get used to the term "rock gardening." I hope that you proclaim unapologetically that you are a rock gardener. It is not worth the effort to try to explain the term, because the person on the other end of the line probably wouldn't really understand the word "garden."

Years ago, while attending my first NARGS Winter Study Weekend, eating a snack in a coffee shop near the hotel with Morris West and Rose Wolford, a young man was intent on hailing our attention by staring at us with drug-dilated eyes. Finally, oblivious to our trying to ignore him, he approached us and asked why we were in town on such a winter weekend. We said that we were here attending a gathering of rock gardeners. "Oh, wow!" he exclaimed, "You mean . . . man, you mean, you're all musicians ?"