I chuckle how two of my favourite groups of plants couldn’t more apart at opposite ends of the plants spectrum. Miniature alpines and giant conifers!

            My fascination of mountain plants probably stemmed from the small rockery my mum had when I was growing up. The mound of soil with a few well placed stones to try and create that mountain landscape look, planted with low-growing Campanula, mossy Saxifrage, Aubretia and oh, dwarf conifers.

It must have started something in me though as during my gardening career, eight years have been spent working with alpine plants at two of our top botanical gardens in St Andrews and Edinburgh. Including two trips to see how they truly survive clinging to the rocks of the Swiss Alps.

            Then today as head gardener at Scone Palace, part of my responsibilities are the care of the Pinetum, a collection of now giant conifers towering over 40m tall with many of them being first planted in the mid-1800’s. Amongst them is the ‘original’ Douglas Fir, a tree grown from seed sent back by the great plant hunter and botanist David Douglas, now 200 years old, and a Western Red Cedar known as the ‘tree of life’ to the native Americans who lived amongst them and who would make canoes out of their rounded trunks.

            Living just above sea level on the east coast of Scotland and with the size of garden that the trunk of one of these giants could fit into, you could think that I’m not really in the best place to to indulge my passion for both groups of plants. However, as we all know, where there is a gardener, there is a way!

            Creating an alpine garden at home isn’t really all that difficult. I acquired a couple of stone troughs which I’ve placed side by side and a crevice garden made from old slate placed on its end filled with gritty compost to try and mimic the cracks and crevices plants find to grow in on the mountain tops. My choice of plants are slightly more advanced now though nothing requiring true specialist care including Oxalis and Edelweiss.

            My alpine garden is only around 3m by 1m but it gives me so much, and all year round too, from the abundance of colour in spring to just admiring the rock work feature in winter. Best of all however is how little maintenance is required to keep this.

            To really make it feel a mountain landscape like the Rockies, Alps or Himalayas, this is where I can satisfy my conifer interest growing a selection of dwarf varieties not only in the ground but in containers too.

            The Dawn Redwood, is a conifer that can grow around 25 metres tall. It’s a wonderful specimen, pyramid in shape with fern like needles that turn a gorgeous bronze in autumn before shedding them for the winter. Unless you have a garden on the scale of Scone Palace size, then unfortunately this conifer is not much use to you.

            That was until a dwarf cultivar which grows to around 2m in 10 years, was raised from a witches broom found growing in the canopy of a Dawn Redwood in the Matthaei Botanical Garden, Michigan, in 1974.

            A witches broom is generally an unexplained abnormal growth, being large clusters of closely growing and many branching twigs, perhaps caused from weather or pest damage. Propagators from nursery then work with these to produce dwarf cultivars of that species.

            Thanks to these opportunities we now can grow a Dawn Redwood in our own gardens, having all the attributes of the parent but at a more appropriate size.

            And this is just one of many dwarf conifers out there.

            The Pinus schwerinii ‘Wiethorst’ that I planted at the bottom of my garden is settling in well to its new home. To be fair, with Perthshire being known as ‘BigTree Country’ they generally do, having the right soil conditions and the right amount of rainfall to thrive where I live. Growing to around 2.5m in height I’m enjoying watching the long, soft and drooping blue-green needles shimmer when the wind blows.

            Then I have Platycladus orientalis ‘Franky Boy’. Love the name but not as much as the foliage which is like thin strands of cord, yellow-green in colour making this specimen come to life over the winter months, brightening up the corner of the garden where it grows. This beauty might take 20 years for it to reach around 1.5m tall.

Conifers also do very well in containers so no problem to have a mini forest in your patio or balcony garden either. I can’t take credit for one natural looking container we have in our garden, my boy carved a bowl shape into a rotten trunk and then drilled a few drainage holes in the bottom to allow excess moisture to escape. It was then planted with a Cryptomeria japonica ‘Sekkan’, although looking prickly it has surprisingly soft foliage to touch that can darken bronze in colder winters.

When growing conifers in a container just make sure you use a specific tree and shrub compost, never allowing this to dry out.

First published in The Weekend supplement of The Courier and Press & Journal newspapers, Saturday 25th July 2026