Here's the perfect pot for January - a little sea of perfection with the promise of tiny blooms. I love picking up an alpine six-pack from the garden centre.    Making this pot was the first bit of gardening I did after the horror.  It helped, somehow.

Gorgeous, even without flowers...

To make a little pot of alpines you need:

One terracotta pot, shallow and wide - or you could use one of those lovely tufa tubs

Multi-purpose compost mixed with a good few handfuls of horticultural grit to make your alpines feel at home

More horticultural grit, or pea gravel to top-dress your pot

A selection of darling little alpine plants (I get mine in a six-pack from my local garden centre).  This time they were:

Jasione laevis 'Blue Light'

Ajuga reptans 'Braun Herz'

Sedum 'Cappa Blanca'

Erodium 'Bishops Form'

Sedum reflexum

Cyclamen neapolitanum

Method

Simply plant them (being especially careful with sedums as they are so brittle) and cover the surface of the compost with a layer of grit or pea gravel, which will keep things nice and dry up top so the leaves of the plants don't get sodden and rot.  Water the pot well and put it on a table or somewhere you can see and appreciate it and where it will get full sun.  These plants don't care about the cold, but they don't like the wet, so if torrential rain is forecast, I tend to move the pot somewhere out of the impending deluge.  I'll post a photo of this when it flowers.