DON’T YOU LOVE it when you have a mountain of work to get done on alpines? Doesn’t everybody in the rock garden community feel this way? We love it even more when we work on a project for years, then suddenly and luckily meet people doing the same thing, and a group project is born! Nick Courtens and Colin Lee of Betty Ford Alpine Gardens in Vail, Colorado, had this very experience one cold May morning in 2018 when Amy Schneider from Denver Botanic Gardens showed up, just as they were busy building their new Silk Road garden. It was the first day we all met to start a collaborative gardens project for alpine species documentation. We went on to do field work in the Colorado alpine together and continue making contributions to both the Global Genome Initiative and the North American Botanic Garden Strategy for Alpine Plant Conservation to this day. Little did we realize how our separate projects would start coming together that morning, and how years of collaboration were about to begin