What Gardening Information Is Available on Jans Alpines?

Jans Alpines (jansalpines.com) is the personal website of Harry Jans, a Dutch alpine plant enthusiast and founding member of the Dutch Rock Garden Society. The site's main practical resource is an image gallery of over 36,000 plant photographs with detailed information, searchable by country and plant species. Around that gallery, the site documents how one alpine gardener actually builds and runs a collection: alpine house and cold frame construction, propagation and sowing routines, and the club network used to exchange experience and rare plants. It is most useful if you want reference images of alpine plants in habitat or in cultivation, or ideas for building your own alpine house, frame, and rock garden.

The image gallery: the core resource

The gallery is the reason most visitors arrive. According to the site, it holds over 36,000 plant images with detailed information, and includes a search engine that lets you filter by country and by plant species.

That combination matters for alpine growers specifically:

• Country search helps if you are trying to match a plant to a habitat — for example, finding what grows in a particular mountain region before deciding whether it will suit your conditions.
• Species search helps if you already know the plant and want to see variation, flowering stage, or how it looks in the wild versus in a pot or trough.

If you are identifying an unknown plant from a hike or checking whether a label is correct, this is the section to start with.

Alpine house and cold frame construction

The site describes Harry Jans's own garden infrastructure in enough detail to be useful as a design reference:

The design logic is worth noting even if you never build the same thing. Sinking an alpine house into the ground uses soil temperature as a buffer, a plunge bed keeps pots cool and moist around the roots, and a tufa wall lets you grow plants vertically in a porous, lime-rich medium. The cold frame's roller-mounted panels and openable front are about controlling airflow and heat rather than just covering plants.

Propagation, sowing, and potting

The workshop function of the small frame house is the giveaway: this is where propagating, sowing, potting up, and storage of potting soil and gravel happen. The site presents these as part of the working routine of the garden rather than as a step-by-step course, so treat it as a description of a working setup you can adapt, not a guaranteed method.

For a concrete task: if you want to raise alpines from seed, the relevant takeaway is that a dedicated covered space with soil and grit stored on hand, separate from the display house, keeps the messy stages out of the way and lets you control moisture on germinating pots.

Garden design ideas and plant collection

The garden is described as constructed in a varied way, with ideas drawn from garden visits both in the Netherlands and abroad, then adapted in Jans's own way. The site points to its IMAGES, GALLERY, and MY GARDEN sections for this.

The stated principle is that you acquire ideas through visiting gardens — especially abroad — and then reinterpret them for your own conditions. If you are planning a rock garden or alpine house, the value here is seeing how one collector combined a plunge, a tufa wall, frames, and open garden beds into a single working space.

Clubs, exchanging experience, and trading rare plants

This is the part of the site that explains how the collection was built. Harry Jans became fascinated by alpine plants during a 1981 vacation in Switzerland, joined the Alpine Garden Society to gather information, and built contacts through that society and others. He describes the exchange of information and experience as crucial to the hobby, and notes that the same network makes it possible to trade rare plants and build a collection.

He is a founding member of the Dutch Rock Garden Society (Nederlandse Rotsplanten Vereniging, N.R.V.), founded 21 September 1985, which grew from about 20 members to roughly 550, including members in Belgium, Germany, and Denmark. He served as its president from 2000 to 2006.

The practical point for a new grower: specialist societies are where identification help, cultivation advice, and access to plants that never appear in general nurseries actually come from.

Who the site is for

• Useful if you want searchable alpine plant images by country or species, or you are designing an alpine house, cold frame, or tufa wall and want a real example to work from.
• Less useful if you need structured beginner courses, current plant or seed ordering, or commercial nursery stock — the site is a personal reference and gallery, not a shop.
• Background on the author: Harry Jans was born in 1957, lives in Loenen near Apeldoorn in the Netherlands, studied Garden Design & Maintenance, and worked for the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment as a Specialist in Wintermaintenance from 1982 until retirement in 2024.