At its annual meeting in Calgary, Canada, the North American Rock Garden Society (NARGS)
recently announced its Norman Singer grant awardees for 2026. Sandhills Horticultural
Gardens (SHG) received a $4,000 grant to construct a crevice rock garden.
This new garden will be located in the center of the entrance circle surrounded by
the existing Lottie Sue Williamson Pollinator Garden.
The construction of the crevice garden will be led by the internationally renowned
rock garden designer Paul Spriggs of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Spriggs
wrote the seminal book on this topic entitled “The Crevice Garden” and will be a keynote
speaker at the NARGS annual conference to be held June 2027 in Raleigh on the NC State
Campus.
A site visit to SHG will take place during the conference for conference attendees
to observe the construction process. Spriggs will lead a team of students from Sandhills
Community College’s horticultural program in building the crevice garden. This process
will educate students in the art of rock garden design and construction. Opportunities
will also be available for SHG members to participate in the design and construction
process as well as for the general public to observe the process as it enfolds.
Kyle Sonnenberg, President of the Sandhills Horticultural Gardens Society and a Board
member of the NARGS Piedmont Chapter, applied for the grant on behalf of SHG. “We
faced stiff competition for the grant,” said Sonnenberg. Other awardees included the
City of Calgary’s public rock garden and the Idaho Botanical Garden. “Our successful
application was able to leverage construction during the upcoming annual conference
in Raleigh along with the grant emphasis on educating people about rock gardening.
We will be bringing an international contingent of rock gardeners to the Sandhills.
Besides observing the crevice garden construction, the group will be led on a wildflower
walk by Bruce Sorie, author of “Wildflowers of the Sandhills”. Tours of SHG and the
Gardens at Sunny Mount will round out the day’s activities.
This grant honors Norman Singer. Besides serving as NARGS President, Singer was a
code breaker at Bletchley Park, UK during World War II. He later went on to a career
in performing arts administration at Lincoln Center in New York and at the Aspen (Colorado)
Music Festival. Serving as NARGS secretary in 1983, he had recommended setting up
an endowment fund to support special projects separate from the operations of the
Society. The fund was approved by the NARGS board in 1984 and was renamed in Singer’s
honor upon his passing in 2001.