A Fairy Graveyard

Jim says my attempt to create a crevice garden with stones placed on edge looks like . . .  a graveyard.

A graveyard where fairies bury their dead, placing mini headstones over their tiny little crypts.

Well, that's creepy.

Crevice gardens are a thing. Alpine plants are tucked in between tightly packed slabs of stones standing on edge on a steep slope, with gravel and fast drainage. It's a kind of rock garden. Here's a photo of what it can look like:

There are many examples and lots of ways to do a crevice garden, using different plants.

My attempt uses just one plant -- Monardella macrantha, which is a low ground cover with fantastic red flowers. You can barely see the little things in the gravel now, but they will spread out and look like this:

And my crevice garden is very tiny, raised just a few inches high at the corner of the patio. Yes, it's feeble, but I needed a place for these monardellas and they want fast drainage and this was a spot. They need shade, surprisingly for a rock garden plant.

So does this look like a fairy graveyard? The shot below gives you an idea of how tiny this crevice garden really is -- it's the mini mound of gravel under the shrub at the far end of this garden strip. Huh.

When the plants spread out it will look better* especially with those bright scarlet monardella flowers drawing your eye and defining the curve around the patio. 

It does look a little strange, I agree. But like graves in the gravel? 

* The enduring motto of my garden is

"it will look better when things grow."

🌱