Crevice Gardening: Even more than it’s cracked up to be with Panayoti Kelaidis May 15, 2025

Crevice Gardening: Even more than it’s cracked up to be with Panayoti Kelaidis
May 15, 2025
7 pm
Live and on Zoom
Members will receive the Zoom link the Sunday before the talk.
Free Center, 725 Main Street, Middletown, CT
Free for members; $10 for non-members (register here)

The history of rock gardening goes back a few centuries in Western Europe and America, and a few millennia in East Asia—it’s always seen as a somewhat “niche” form of gardening—pursued by enthusiasts, while “ordinary” people stick to perennial gardens or perhaps annuals or even conifers. This talk will show the enormous scope and variety of the modern crevice garden as it’s being practiced around the world—especially in New England where spectacular examples exist.

In rocky Connecticut, this isn’t quite so much the case—there is a long deep history of rock gardening in New England (with all those rocks!). But trough gardening, and especially the exciting new art of crevice gardening are breathing new life into the art of plants and rocks.

This iteration of rock gardening was born in the Czech Republic almost 60 years ago, where it was perfected and has transplanted vigorously in North America—especially in Victoria, British Columbia thanks to Paul Spriggs, and in Colorado thanks to Kenton Seth. Crevice gardens have become an exciting new way to grow all manner of plants, from challenging alpines, to woodlanders and even cacti and succulents.

Panayoti Kelaidis is a plant explorer, gardener and public garden administrator associated with Denver Botanic Gardens where he is now Director of Outreach. He began his career at DBG in 1980 as curator of the Rock Alpine Garden, where he designed and oversaw the initial plantings of this extensive garden. Garden Design Magazine has rated this garden as the best public rock garden in North America. He has designed plantings for many of the gardens at DBG, as well as being part of the design team at Centennial garden and has designed the Watersmart knot gardens at Denver’s Civic Center as part of Denver Mayor Hickenlooper’s Water Conservation initiative.

He has introduced hundreds of native ornamentals from throughout the Western United States to general horticulture. He has taken five collecting trips to South Africa researching the high mountain and steppe flora there, as well as travels to the Andes, the Himalaya (from both Pakistan and China) as well as travels throughout much of Europe, the Caucasus and Turkey. Perhaps the best known of Panayoti’s introductions are the many showy hardy ice plants: several dozen of these are now available at garden centers across America and in other parts of the world.

In addition to introducing a host of exotic plants to general horticulture, Panayoti has been a champion Western native plants. He was the second secretary of the Colorado Native Plant Society, and past president of the American Penstemon Society. He has explored the Western mountains from Alaska to southern Mexico, collecting seeds of more than a thousand kinds of Western American wild plants for Denver Botanic Gardens’ collections and for research and study.

Panayoti has been party to the discovery of a number of species of plants new to science including In 1980 he pressed the first specimens of a lady’s tress orchid in Golden that was subsequently to be named Spiranthes diluvialis by Charles Sheviak.  In 1987 John Lavranos sent Panayoti an Aizoaceae he collected on Komsberg Pass in South Africa which Panayoti subsequently shared with John Trager at the Huntington Botanical Garden, and finally Steve Hammer. This taxon was finally recognized as Delosperma sphalmanthoides by Hammer. In March of 1996 Panayoti and Jim Archibald collected a specimen of an undetermined Moraea on Mount-aux-Sources, Orange Free State, South Africa which Peter Goldblatt determined to be a new species. Several more of his south African collections are undergoing evaluation as likely new species to be published in the coming years.

Panayoti takes particular pride in sharing the plants and information he accrues through many channels: he has lectured in nearly 150 cities in nine countries, and has been featured in dozens of television, newspaper and magazine pieces.

He has been inducted in 2000 to the Colorado Nursery and Greenhouse Growers Hall of Fame. I in 2004 he received the Boulder History Museum’s 60 Year Living History award, in 2003 by being inducted into the Garden Club of America as Member-at-Large, in  2002 he received the National Garden Clubs Medal of Honor and in 2000 he received the Arthur Hoyt Scott Medal from the Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College. He has received three of the North American Rock Garden Society’s awards over the last two decades. In 2009 he received the Liberty Hyde Bailey award of the American Horticultural Society.

He believes that gardening is humanity’s best way to gain an appreciation of nature and natural processes. In an increasingly urbanized and polluted world, horticulture is, perhaps, the last best way to create a sustainable future for mankind and our planet.