Paul Spriggs

Paul Spriggs is a Canadian rock gardener, landscape designer and crevice garden specialist based in Victoria, British Columbia. He is the co-author, with Kenton Seth, of The Crevice Garden: How to make the perfect home for plants from rocky places (Filbert Press, 2022) — the first comprehensive book devoted to this distinctive new form of rock gardening.

Paul has been a professional gardener since the age of nineteen, drawing on a parallel lifelong fascination with the alpine landscapes of western North America — the Cascades, Coast Ranges and Olympics — that he has been hiking and climbing since boyhood. He began rock gardening in the late 1990s, and from the mid-2000s onwards immersed himself in the emerging Czech school of crevice garden design, apprenticing in Victoria with one of its founding figures, Zdeněk Zvolánek, before travelling repeatedly to the Czech Republic to study its origins. He runs Spriggs Gardens Landscaping in Victoria and is a past President of the Vancouver Island Rock and Alpine Garden Society (VIRAGS).

Over the past two decades Paul has built crevice gardens at every scale, from small trough plantings to multi-tonne installations in public parks and private gardens across western North America. His work is recognisable for its devotion to natural rock placement — a sense of stillness in the stonework before a single plant goes in — and for an exceptional plant palette weighted toward dwarf and miniature alpines that he collects and cultivates at his own gardens in Victoria. With Kenton Seth he co-founded the Modern Crevice Garden community, which has helped grow the technique from a niche speciality into an internationally practised form of garden art.

Paul lectures and runs workshops for garden clubs across Canada, the United States and Europe, and has been featured by The New York Times in conversation with Margaret Roach (and on her A Way to Garden podcast), in Pacific Horticulture, and on the Garden Masterclass series with Noel Kingsbury. He is also a working photographer, and much of the field and garden imagery in The Crevice Garden is drawn from his own archive.

He shares plants, projects and field photography on Instagram as @paulspriggsrockgardener and continues to help lead the Modern Crevice Garden community.

By Paul Spriggs

The Crevice Garden

How to make the perfect home for plants from rocky places
with Kenton Seth

View the book