Product Description

The authoritative guide to creating and planting wonderful garden troughs.

Troughs, those elegant stone containers so treasured by alpine gardeners, can now be made at home with a lightweight concrete-based material called hypertufa, formed with simple molds. Like original stone, hypertufa troughs are weatherproof, combine well with other landscape materials, and make the perfect environment for evocative miniature gardens.

Each trough can have its own microenvironment with the perfect size, soil type, rock forms, mulch, and siting for the desired plants. Sedums and succulents, alpines and dwarf evergreens are some of the plants that can be showcased in trough gardens. Authors Joyce Fingerut, much in demand for her trough-building workshops, and Rex Murfitt, alpine gardening authority, present specialized information on making and planting successful troughs in a most readable yet thorough manner. This book also includes hundreds of photographs, drawings, a plant directory, sample planting plans, resource lists, bibliography, subject index, and plant index. Instructions are complete for making the troughs as well as for planting them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #362092 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .1 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 164 pages

Lren Russel, "Rock Garden Quarterly" (the Bulletin of the North American Rock Garden Society), Spring, 1999
"Moderately priced at $21, this well-illustrated book is an excellent value for anyone, experienced or not, who is interested in trough building."

About the Authors
Joyce Fingerut, President-elect of the North American Rock Garden Society and a well-known lecturer on making hypertufa garden troughs. Many of her award-winning troughs have been seen at the Philadelphia flower show and other horticultural exhibitions.

Rex Murfitt, trained in England at the famous W. E. Th. Ingwersen, Birch Farm Hardy Plant Nursery with Walter Ingwersen VMH and his son Will Ingwersen VMH, building rock gardens and traveling widely. There he learned the romance and lore of alpine plants. He later served as head gardener to Constance Spry. He eventually moved to New York and started Stonecrop Nurseries with Frank and Anne Cabot. He now lives in British Columbia where he writes and lectures on rock gardening, troughs, and alpine plants.