Worthy goal Arturo!
Interesting you bring up art history! I was going to work that in when I decided to get around to taking up this topic again
This is where I live--less than a hundred feet above my elevation and less than a mile from my house:
Rocks--
naturally strewn everywhere, big ones, little ones, and in-between ones; stuff is growing all on its own--sagebrush, scrub trees, grasses, and some assortment of western perennial and annual weeds, er, I mean wildflowers, and the majority is not low growing.
I think the thing that irks me more than anything is that some guy wrote a book defining "natural" and prescribing rules for rock gardening that are rather limited, and now the phrase "garden with rocks" is brandished for everything else. Even that would be sort-of-okay with me if it wasn't such a derogatory phrase upholding the tradition.
Although, I must confess to my own hypocrisy:
When I moved into my house, the first thing I did was remove the "rock gardens" around the foundation. They were layers of black plastic garbage bags with a few holes cut in them for some struggling plants, covered with red lava rocks and Convolvulus arvensis.
As much as I want a broader definition, even I could not embrace that end of the spectrum. I don't hate on lava rocks--I just can't garden through plastic trash bags
