If the relief of your site can hardly be called ideal, then do not rush to despair! Any flaw or defect can always be skillfully transformed into an advantage. For example, an artificial pond can be made from a hollow, a beautiful flower bed or mixborder can be laid out on a hill. If there are many such hills, then walking paths and sidewalks will look very fresh and creative between them.
But you can really envy the owner of a site on a slope, because this is just a treasure trove for design thinking. Firstly, you can create a garden staircase on a slope, and secondly, retaining walls made of natural stone will fit perfectly into such a landscape. Any flower bed will look great on a slope, as if in a painting. Dry streams, rock gardens, rockeries … in a word, whatever your heart desires.
Let’s dwell on rockeries in more detail. A rockery is an embankment made of natural stone. When creating it, remember that it will look most impressive when it matches the rest of the design of your site and also looks like a natural structure. The optimal ratio of the height to the width of the embankment is one to ten.
The choice of stone plays a huge role. It is worth giving preference to natural stone, as it is more noble and natural. The size and shape of the stones also play an important role. You cannot allow your rockery to turn into a meaningless pile of stones in the middle of your site.
You cannot consider your rock garden complete if there is nothing else in it except stones. Any garden, any designer structure should always have ornamental plants. Selecting plants is not as easy as it seems at first glance. Firstly, all planted plants should feel comfortable in the climatic conditions of your garden. Secondly, they should emphasize and complement the design line of the entire garden.
Today, the choice of ornamental plants is huge. The most popular are all kinds of ferns, mosses, heathers (for Russia). Plants for a rock garden should be selected already at the foundation stage, since when planting plants, the soil should already be prepared. If you do not take care of this at the very first stages, there will be no talk of a successful rock garden. Your plants will simply die and instead of decorating your site, the rock garden will become a useless pile of stones.
Stones should also be laid according to certain rules. In nature, in natural conditions, you will never find stones that are the same in shape and size, so this should not be in rock gardens. Also remember that large stones and boulders “sink” into the ground over time and, in addition, a mound of smaller stones forms on one side. The natural position of stones is an orderly position. If you have ever been in the mountains, you would have noticed that all the protruding parts are directed in one direction.
So, if you can follow these simple rules when creating a rock garden in your garden, you will end up with a garden that is different from all others in its uniqueness, originality and freshness of ideas.
