A friend borrowed my van at Christmas time to go back home to France to collect some furniture. He mentioned that where he’s from, in the Le Val de Loire, they have tufa and he could bring me back some for our alpine garden. We were delighted when he arrived back with half a ton of it. However, it turned out that it was not exactly tufa but tuffeau; much harder than the Derbyshire tufa in which our existing alpines are growing in. It has only 50% porosity compared with tufa. Not to be deterred, we’ve built a Tuffeau Rock Face, drilled into the rocks with a hole saw and planted some Androsaces, Saxifrages, Silenes and other alpine plants. Time will tell whether it’ll be successful or not: hopefully it will. Fingers crossed.
These shows plantings started at the top, which will be gradually extended all over and all the way down..
