As of: April 7, 2024, 7:03 p.m
By: Larissa Strohbusch
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The Alps in your front yard: With a rock garden you can bring a beautiful mountain landscape into your home. A guide and plant selection.
A beautiful garden without gardening: Not everyone loves digging in the ground and lovingly caring for their plants year in and year out. If you prefer to make things easy for yourself, integrate a rock garden into your outdoor area. Admittedly, that means a lot of work at first. But once the stone bed is in place, it is very easy to care for, beautiful to look at and sustainable.
Step 1: Create a sketch of your future rock garden
You shouldn't just blindly create an ecologically sound rock garden. The bigger, the more carefully you need to plan. To do this, create a sketch in advance. The first thing that is important is the location: a stone bed should always be sunny and, if possible, oriented towards the south or southwest. In the best case, there is a slope with a gradient of around ten percent. More or less is also fine - but requires special precautions.
A rock garden is beautiful to look at and sustainable too. © Zoonar.com/K.-U. Haessler/IMAGO
How to plan your stone bed:
Choose a suitable location in your garden.
Mark all areas that are in the shade due to trees or similar.
Check the soil condition.
Think about how big the stones can be - a spacious area can also tolerate a boulder. In smaller rock gardens, it's better to stick with small to medium-sized versions. Also think about which types of rock you prefer. All should be weatherproof. In large systems you can have fun with different species, in small ones less is more.
Draw where you want to create paths or watercourses or possibly place benches.
Sketch where you want to place the large stones.
Think about which plants you plant where. Pay attention to how tall they grow and how much space they need in width. Also keep in mind that some plants like lime, but others don't.
You can find even more exciting garden topics in the regular newsletter from our partner 24garten.de.
Step 2: Create a rock garden
Now it's time to get to work. This is how a rock garden is created:
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Get your stones - ideally you should take local types of rock from the quarry. This is also the cheapest. You also need gravel, sand, building rubble, possibly nutrient-poor soil, vole wire and weed fleece (promotional link).
Dig your soil about 30 to 50 centimeters deep. Remove weeds and roots as you go.
Lay out a vole wire to gently get rid of the unwanted pests.
If there is no slope or a slope of less than ten percent, create a drainage system. This way the water can drain away easily. To do this, fill your pit about ten to 20 centimeters with a mixture of gravel, sand, building rubble and earth. If the slope is too steep, lay out your rock garden in terraces.
A weed control layer follows this – this saves you a lot of work. The individual parts should overlap at least ten centimeters. Slit a cross in the places where large stones will later lie.
Now fill the rest of the system with sandy-gravelly soil. To do this, you can mix the existing topsoil with sand and gravel.
Next, place the large stones. The wide area is at the bottom. The stone should be about a third buried in the ground.
This is followed by the medium-sized and small stones, watercourse, paths and benches.
Before you plant your plants, the garden needs to rest for a few days. This is how the stones sink in and sit tight.
Finally, your rock garden will turn green.
Step 3: Find suitable plants for the rock garden
A variety of tough plants from mountain regions thrive in stone beds and can withstand changeable weather and dry summers. These include flowers and perennials, ferns, woody plants and succulents. You can choose whether you stick strictly to plants from a certain region or mix wildly. Just make sure that the lime content of your stones matches the needs of the plants. A popular concept is the Alpinum. This imitates the landscape of the Alps with its flora.
Typical plants for your Alpinum:
Edelweiss
gentian
Bluebell
Buttercup
Ball flowers
Pasque pasques
Mountain pine
cloves
Primroses
Saxifrage
Winter heather
Another option is to focus on a Mediterranean rock garden. Popular stone plants for this are:
broom
lavender
rosemary
sage
thyme
Dwarf pines
Cypresses
Once you have planted the plants, you don't have to worry about them much anymore. Just remember to water regularly during dry times. Especially at the beginning, you should also keep an eye on weeds - moss and other unwanted guests could otherwise suffocate the young plants.
How sustainable is a rock garden?
Stony gardens have a bad reputation. But the rock garden should not be confused with the gravel garden. The latter is so bad for nature that it is even banned in some regions: nothing can grow here, the ground heats up due to the stones, and water cannot seep away. It's completely different in the rock garden. The carefully planned stone landscape provides shade and shelter for small reptiles and insects all year round. In between, native plants bloom and the water can seep away easily in the sandy soil.