P aul Spriggs has been rock gardening for more than two decades and building crevice gardens for the last sixteen years — learning much of his craft directly from the Czech innovator Zdeněk Zvolánek, who spent a number of years in Victoria and was a fixture of the local Vancouver Island Rock and Alpine Garden Society. Spriggs runs his own landscaping practice out of Victoria, British Columbia, and has served as a past president of VIRAGS.
His installations range from small trough features to large public commissions involving many tonnes of stone, and his plant-hunting trips have given him a working familiarity with the dwarf alpine and steppe floras of the temperate world. He is a regular contributor to Pacific Horticulture and lectures internationally to rock garden societies.
With Kenton Seth he co-authored The Crevice Garden, a working manual for a form of rock gardening that mimics the closely packed strata of mountains, deserts and coastlines — and an approach increasingly suited to a climate in which water is no longer cheap.
