How To Get Started Gardening

6 Easy Rock Gardening Tips for the Beginner

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A rock garden is a unique way to decorate your yard and create a positive impression with visitors. Certain landscapes are more suitable for rock gardens than others. For example, if you live in a rocky area, working creatively with rocks might achieve a more natural look in your yard than if the area is swampy. Rock gardening can be a fulfilling endeavor, allowing you to turn those rocky backyards into masterpieces blending vegetation and rock. To create a beautiful rock garden the easy way, follow these tips for beginners.

Work With a Small Garden at First

To avoid overwhelming yourself with a complicated scheme for the whole backyard, consider starting with a tiny area. The advantages of doing this are numerous, but they include ease of maintenance and lower cost. With a larger rock garden, weeding your plants takes more time. If you have a large backyard, you will be spending more hours watering the plants, arranging stones, and pruning the shrubs. A better approach is to start with just a corner of your backyard. Create your rock garden in a spot where water is easy to access. Clear a small patch for the plants and then arrange your rock garden there. The ease of maintenance will come in handy in times when you are much more busy down the line.

Minimalist Foliage With Lawn and Rock

Some of the best rock garden designs for beginners include mostly rock and minimal foliage. You might be wondering what good a rock garden will do if it's mostly rock and has little vegetation. This combination works so well because the rocks can be arranged in a myriad of ways. For example, you can combine white and brown rocks in a circle around a patch of plain green lawn. The natural shades of rock create a wonderful, natural-looking aesthetic that highlights the attractive green of the grass. This simple but effective rock garden design requires very little effort to put together. All you need to do is cut the lawn every once in a while when it gets too tall.

Extend Wooden Floors With Rock Extensions

If your patio or deck has a wooden floor, you can create a stunning look by adding a brown rock extension into your rock garden. For example, you can add a little rock path that leads into your rock garden. The garden becomes an extension of your patio or house, fusing indoor and outdoor living. This approach creates a pleasing aesthetic. On days when you decide to barbecue, you can treat your patio and rock garden as just a single unified place. The rock garden will be an effective hosting and entertaining area.

Building Around a Small Pond

If you have a pond in your backyard, you can build a rock garden around it to enhance the appeal of the entire backyard. A pond makes a good place for a rock garden because it might already use rock or stone as part of the walls that hold the water back. Some landscape designers prefer to find stone of a matching look and using that for the rock in the surrounding rock garden. If you manage to pull this off, the result can look highly sophisticated. The presence of a water body with stone creates an aged look, adding a sentimental touch to the appearance of the garden. To get an even better result, you will want some leafy trees in the backdrop. This makes a suitable backdrop for pursuits like poetry, music, or sitting down for hours in the shade with a book.

Add Colorful Flower Combinations

To enhance the visual appeal of your rock garden, you should consider adding colorful flower combinations at some point. While the minimalist look of plain grass works well for small spaces, with a larger area, there is greater need to fill in the garden with multiple varieties of flowers. For example, you can pair peace lilies with begonias to create a colorful look. In summer times when the flowers are in bloom, the garden will strike an upbeat mood.

Cactus and Rock Combinations

If you live in a dry area such as Arizona or Texas, you can make effective use of the naturally growing cacti by building rock gardens around it. The pairing of cactus and rock makes for effective outdoor decoration. You can opt for small, fuzzy cacti, which match well with small rock walls, or larger cacti for boulder-like rock outcroppings. To create a more artful look, you should pick out some painted decorative flower pots and grow various small cacti in them. You can then arrange these in lines or other patterns around your rock garden to create an eye-catching look.