Diarmuid Gavin: How to adorn your garden with alpine elegance

Pretty yet resilient, alpines make great plants for the garden... just be sure to put them in the right place

Pulsatilla vulgaris or the Pasque flower

Diarmuid Gavin

Alpine plants are often delicate and small in appearance. This, however, belies their incredible tenacity and resilience. They have adapted to survive in hostile conditions, often in rocky mountains at high elevations.

They flourish above the tree line — that point at which trees are no longer able to grow due to the harsh environmental conditions. But little alpines hunker down, creeping along the ground and ducking away from the wind. And their methods of survival are one of the remarkable wonders of nature. Some protect themselves with a hairy cover to survive the strong, scorching sunlight while many adopt a squirrel methodology of hibernating under a layer of snow for periods during the winter!