How Can You Create a Rock Garden That Looks Amazing at Your Home?
A rock garden is a great way to create a low-maintenance garden in a landscape, but sometimes they can come off looking like they don’t belong or are a cop out to bringing a great design to the area. Follow these tips to create a rock garden that is low maintenance yet looks amazing in your yard.
What is a rock garden?
A rock garden utilizes rocks as its main focus in the landscape. There are many different ways to create a rock garden. The most recognized may be the use of huge rocks as sculptural elements with smaller rocks filling in the empty ground spaces around them. This is a good way to bring visual interest to your landscape, but there are many different ways to create and design a rock garden, some of them even include the use of a small amount of plants to bring an element of life and movement to the space.
What are the most common types of rock gardens?
Though the most recognizable rock garden is the one that is completely rocks. There are many different types of rock gardens that professional landscapers will use to bring some interest and an element of hardscaping or low-maintenance landscaping to a yard. Here are the five most utilized types of rock gardening in landscape design.
Hillside Rock Garden
This rock garden utilizes a hillside to bring structural interest that is low maintenance to a difficult-shaped area of a yard. Instead of placing plants in areas that can be hard to reach and properly cared for, placing hardscape structural elements like rocks helps bring interest to the hill without just letting it go, wild and natural, and look uncut or overgrown
Zen Rock Garden
A Zen rock garden most often utilizes pea gravel to create a space that feels structured, yet calming and relaxing. The main focus of a Zen garden is to create a feeling of Zen or mental relaxation. It can create satisfying clean lines in the design with minimalistic yet visually pleasing elements.
Desert Rock Garden
This type of rock garden is most often utilized in dry and hot climates. You may see them often in Arizona. Many homeowners will opt to replace green landscaping with rock gardens. This is extremely drought-friendly and very low maintenance for a difficult climate to create a green oasis. Color, life, and interest are brought in with drought, friendly plants like succulents and cacti. Rocks in interesting color hues may also be utilized.
Sprawling Rock Garden
This type of garden is utilized to bring interest to a very large space in a landscape while still keeping things low-maintenance and visually appealing. Sometimes, a fake river effect is utilized by shaping rocks to look like a body of water trickling through the landscape. Sometimes, boulders of significant size are utilized to create art like structural elements, while smaller rocks fill in the extra space.
Raised Rock Gardens
This one is less utilized, but gives a homeowner the ability to have the visual interest of a rock garden in a more contained space. It serves as more of a hard escape, decorative element, and a functional landscape space. It seems like the easiest thing to add to a landscape, but it can also easily feel like a random addition to a landscape without careful thought.
How to incorporate a rock guardian into your space
Creating a rock garden seems like it should be simple and straightforward. However, it can be more difficult than many average homeowners realize. This is because there are many ways to bring hardscaping elements into your yard, but it takes skilled planning to make it look intentional and elevated rather than like the homeowner is creating a lazy, effortless space that doesn’t make sense in the area.
Rock Gardens need a lot of careful forethought and design planning before incorporating them into your landscape space. Rock gardens can look structurally interesting and be a great benefit to low-maintenance landscaping, but they need to have plenty of planning and preparation. It is best to ask yourself how you envision the rock garden looking and if it will look like it belongs in your landscape as something that elevates the space, not just like volcano rock was laid in the flowerbeds at grandma’s house in the 70s.
The ultimate best way to incorporate a rock garden in your landscape and have it look like it was always meant to be. There is to hire the help of an experienced landscape design artist. A landscape design artist will help you to take what you see in your head and bring it to life in your yard. They may even suggest some tweaks to make it work perfectly in your landscape so that it looks like a piece of art and not an awkward way of getting around weeding your flower bed.
If you want to take your yard from great to amazing, contact the landscape designers at First Fruits Landscaping. Let’s get started turning your yard into a work of art that not only looks great but also functions well for your lifestyle. We provide landscaping services in Snohomish County and King County.