What is a rock garden?

Well, we could say it was a garden with rocks in it, we could say it was a garden composed only of rocks, or even a garden of plants found only growing in rocks.  Generally speaking, rock gardening is the same as alpine gardening and it involves growing plants that are normally found in mountainous regions of the world. Whether it is one rock or one bit of soil in a bunch of rocks, if a gardener can get plants and rocks involved, that is rock gardening. Why do we grow rock garden plants. One of the most famous of American rock gardeners, H. Lincoln Foster perhaps said it best when he talked about rock garden plants. "There are among them some of the easiest and most abundantly flowering garden plants, and also those challenging haunters of remote places, which by the very difficulty of their taming lure us year after year to discover the secret of their adoption." (From "Rock Gardening" H.L. Foster - see resources) Lincoln Foster had it perfectly correct. There are extremely easy and beautiful rock garden plants that easily earn their way in our gardens, and some of these are listed and described in other parts of this FAQ.   However, and this is the challenge of rock gardening, there are many more that are more beautiful but more challenging to grow. Once you begin this process of discovery, of learning how to "tame" the wee beauties, you'll be forever changed as a gardener. A rock garden is whatever you want to call it, the plants are mostly from mountainous regions and this is the first step on your journey into a wondrous region of gardening. 

What's with all the Latin? Why can't you just use names we can all understand?

This is a common question in gardening circles and deserves a fair answer. Each plant has a Latin name as a unique identifier just as you have a name that identifies you. Sometimes with people, there may be two of the same name (there are several Doug Greens in my area) and you have to be careful just who you're talking about, (is that Doug Green the nurseryman/book author or Doug Green the truck driver?). This duplication is not a problem because we can add other identifiers and mostly people talking about Doug Green will be local neighbours. With plants, gardeners all over the world discuss individual plants and keeping them straight demands a scientific rigidity. For example, Bellflower is a beautiful name for at least 3 plant families that have bell-like flowers, (Campanula being one and there are at least 200 species of them.) If we called them all Bellflowers, we'd never sort out what we were talking about. Gardeners use Horticultural Latin so that each plant will have a unique name shared by no other plant on the planet. When we call a plant by its Latin name, everybody on the world-wide internet knows exactly which plant we are discussing. 

Horticultural Latin mainly uses two words to describe most plants although you will often see three words in the internet discussions or at your local nursery. The first is the family name that describes the plant family and this would be similar to our family names, in my case "Green". An example would be Campanula. The second is the specific epithet and this describes the individual plant in the family; in my case Doug and in the example case, carpatica. Note that while my name is capitalized, the specific epithet of the plant name is never capitalized. The third name you may find refers to a variety name. Perhaps a plant breeder has found a new genetic variation of Campanula carpatica and the colour is better than the original. The plant is still genetically Campanula carpatica but it now is somewhat different so the breeder will give it a variety name. One example is 'Blue Clips'. Note the variety name is enclosed in single quote marks to distinguish it as a variety name. The plant's full name then is Campanula carpatica 'Blue Clips'. 

With alpine plants, many of them are pretty rare and not found in garden centres so common names don't exist anyway, (we could make some up I suppose). The Latin is used exclusively on Alpine-L to discuss plants and that way we all know just what plant is being discussed. In many cases, we don't know the plant being discussed and this is where the education begins. See the resource section for a good book on Horticultural Latin and other places to start your horticultural journey.