Obtaining Tufa is like getting “Hens’ Teeth” in Ireland but Lo! and Behold! a miracle has arrived. A friend brought a half ton of Tufa from the Loire Vally in France back in a van. Apparently there’re walls of it at the edge of the river and traditionally it was dug into to form troglodyte wine cellars  for keeping wine cool. This French tufa is much harder than the tufa that I already have in the garden and which came from Derbyshire. The Derbyshire tufa seems to be lime encrusted sphagnum moss into which plants have been happily growing here for fifteen years. We’ll see how our Alpine plants will manage in this very much harder tufa. Pic underneath is of the tufa after it arrived.

And this is the tufa rock face before it being planted with Alpines. I’ll be drilling into the individual rocks with a 2″ hole saw to plant them.