Interested in seeing member photos of rock gardens in their entirety. I've seen many lovely plant-specific photos, many of which were uploaded by member @growitall , but those have just whet my appetite for more.

If you have a rock garden, please post some photos here.

TIA!

I'm not sure if this qualifies as a "rock garden", as it is mostly gravel, and flat, but it does have rocks in it. The first pic was taken in September 2006, and the second in June 2010. The entire flowerbed now needs taking apart and re-planting, as the middle has been taken over by creeping thymes and the edges have been invaded by grasses and weeds from the lawn.

I like that area, June!
Did you have issues with lots of stray wispy grasses popping up in it before it filled in, or did the gravel mulch keep that to a workable minimum?

Me agrees!

LOVE that area!

Very nice!

Okay, I apologize ahead of time if this is too many photos. But this was my beloved rock garden. This is from my first house. It is bittersweet to revisit these pictures. Oh how I loved my rock garden!

These are the pictures of how it looked when I moved in

Here is the redo. It was a long couple of days. Thank heavens I had Mom to help me

You got the rocks! Looks great!

More progressions

So glad you posted those Jen, but are you going to post some of after you redid the rocks/path and then we planted it? I loved that rock garden!

Ha! Cross posted! Sorry!

And more

Some other views

And now you have HUGE rocks to work around!

Loved that garden above the rock garden as well.

Me, too! Out of all the great images in this set, I like this one the very best.

jvdubb said:

Sweet!

Thanks so much, Jennifer!



I think my greatest fear in designing one of these is in the maintenance. I've spent so much time in the past digging and flinging rocks out of my beds...
Once weed roots get in under the rocks isn't it a major job to extricate them?

I am sorry if I posted an obnoxious amount of pics. Of all the gardening I have ever done this still is my all time favorite area. Oh how these pics take me back. So heartbreaking since I know the current owners have not done anything with it.

My biggest struggles with this rock garden were not with weeds. They were with the plants that existed there before I redid it. Snow on the Mountain, oregano, orange ditch lily, lily of the valley. I was still fighting them when I moved. Weeds were not a huge problem for me as I packed it so full of plants. The first year it was mainly annuals. But over three years it became mostly perennials.

Back then I did not have the Cobra Head tool. But that tool would have been very helpful working around those rocks.

Excellent rock garden, Jennifer! If you feel the urge to drop by and re-do mine, I won't stop you.

Chelle, in answer to your question about seedling grasses, I don't recall any problems. Annual weeds pull out very easily. The gravel is more than a mulch. I think about 5 tons of gravel went into the bed. To make the bed, I excavated soil so that the gravel would be four to six inches deep. I should have gone deeper. At a perennials nursery I know, there is a raised bed filled several feet deep with gravel, and all kinds of plants love growing in it. The gravel is just road grade, sandy gravel dug from the local gravel pit. While it dries fast on top, it stays moist beneath the plants.

A few from here...

JuneOntario said:... At a perennials nursery I know, there is a raised bed filled several feet deep with gravel, and all kinds of plants love growing in it. The gravel is just road grade, sandy gravel dug from the local gravel pit. While it dries fast on top, it stays moist beneath the plants.

This just amazes me; no added compost or decomposable materials whatsoever? It sounds way too easy...well, except for moving all that gravel!

****


Beautiful, David.

What type of material is used for the structural layer of this tall one?

DavidofDeLand said: