Rock Landscaping Ideas for the Rockery Garden

One of the best rock landscaping ideas I know of is to make sure that you do not isolate the rock as though it were a little island in a sea of grass, but try to make it merge naturally with its surroundings as though it really and truly belonged.

In some gardens extra rocks can rise to the surface a little distance away from the main rockery garden. They can be fringed with grass and adorned with some lovely scrambler plants. A sharply defined cut edge between lawn and rockery garden is ugly - instead join it to a lawn level with a scree made of chippings or gravel. This also can form a path round the rockery garden if you wish.

Ground-hugging plants at the base of the rock garden will merge with the grass. If they are tough plants such as carpeting thyme, mowing the lawn will present no problem for these will not be harmed by the occasional shearing.

Alpines have different tastes and your soil is likely to grow some better than others. Some plants will grow best if some peat or leafmould is worked into the place there they are to grow. Some like to be surrounded by limestone chippings. Others do not seem to mind at all, so long as they do not have to suffer heavy drips from trees.

Not only herbaceous perennials grow on rockery gardens but there are also many delightful little bulbous plants which will flower in winter, spring and autumn. The range of naturally dwarf shrubs and trees is great and includes many enchanting plants. Many remain green all winter. When flowerless, the cushions, rosettes, carpets and drapes of lovely leaves are still decorative. Garden centres and nurseries everywhere stock many species and varieties, and all alpines are grown in pots and so can be transplanted at almost any time.

Incidentally, if it is the little alpine plants you want more than the actual rockery garden remember that many of these can be grown by other methods. You can, for example, grow them in a border made on what is known as a "dry" stone wall. This is a double wall of stones set apart and the space between them filled with suitable soil. Plants are not only set in the wall-bound border but also between the stones of the wall.

It is best if these can be planted as the wall is being built, so that you can ensure that their roots are firmly and well covered with soil. As plants have to be laid on their sides so that they grow over the surface of the wall, this is important. Walls of this kind can be as high as you wish and you may, in fact, find such a garden easier to maintain than a full scale rock garden. A wall up to 1-½ feet high need have no cement between the stones. Higher walls will need this strengthening at the base.

A similar wall to this may be very useful in dividing one portion of the garden from another. Also, if your garden is on a slope, a flat terraced area, supported by a wall of this type but single and not double might look much prettier. It is likely to be much easier to run.

A friend of mine grows many alpines in a sunny, well-drained bed which surrounds a formal pool. Here they seem to flower, one or other of them, the year through.

If pottering rather than active gardening suits your purpose, you might consider having an alpine house. This is an unheated greenhouse in which alpines are grown in flower pots or pans. Easy and cheap to run, it provides a place to work and to admire the plants no matter what the weather.

The fact that all the plants are growing on raised benches or staging means that bending is at a minimum — an important point for many who suffer from a bad back.

In all garden planning, building or re-making, it is wise to look to the future to consider the time when muscles will weary a little earlier and the back finds more difficulty in straightening up again after a bout of bending. One of the best ways to make gardening easier and quicker is to bring some of the work up to waist level.