This where I get thrown out of all the rock garden societies

[Nold]

By posting a picture of my idea of rock garden design.
Bob

[deesen]

Er! Well! It looks to be a fair scree

[RickR]

And natural looking, with the different size aggregates...

[James McGee]

This looks like the gravel moraines in my area.  Perfect habitat for Bird's-Foot Violet, Hoary Puccoon, Fringed Puccoon, Prairie Smoke, Violet Woodsorrel, Small Skullcap, Purple Prairie Clover, White Prairie Clover, Cylindrical Blazing Star, Silky Aster, Sky Blue Aster, Smooth Blue Aster, Hill Prairie ecotype of Shooting Star, Yellow Star Grass, Prairie Phlox, Prairie Onion, Prairie Gentian, Seneca Snakeroot, Side-Oats Grama Grass, Little Bluestem, Prairie Dropseed, Carex umbellata, Carex richardsonii and many other great plants.

James

[Will Youngman Comrie Perthshire]

Well Bob you may well need to fall on your sword on this one. However i would be grateful for your Scree two months ago i moved house it had 4 lawns. I have dug up 2 already and at least one more to go.

[Hoy]

That is something I could have! Why haven't you put plants in already?

Here's mine:

   

[Nold]

The new rock garden is actually filled with plants. I hesitate to name them, for fear of bringing the wrath of Nemesis. The other two thirds of this garden are filled with plants that no one else in the world grows and that no one else will ever have unless they come here to take cuttings (talk about Nemesis ...). Could rock gardening be any better than this?


Bob

[Schier]

I enjoyed this last post of yours Bob, hehe... I know all too well the feeling of not
naming the new treasures.  I also have a new rock garden ready for the spring, well, more
of a sand bed/rock garden area and I'll be putting in some teenage plants grown from seed.
That is - if they make it through the winter, and then, maybe I'll tempt fate and name
them and put up a photo...

[Will Youngman Comrie Perthshire]

Bob you are really teasing us, will follow this one with interest.

Regards Will

[Lori S.]

Looks like an enviable garden for alpines, needless to say... much the same sort of substrate that we see in various places on our local hikes:  
 

And not so different from this... if you squint a little...    

[Nold]

Not exactly the same topic, but two out of three of these are plants that no one else has. Ha!
Three dwarf Picea pungens from Jerry Morris. Top to bottom, "319", "MU 92", and 'Clark's Tiny'. The last was named for the late Clark Coe and is probably in the trade.
(The plants in the new rock garden, the plants that no one else has, are also from Jerry, snatched up right before he decided to give up his dwarf conifer business. I killed a few, naturally, and also wish I'd gotten more plants from him.)
Visitors sometimes ask what I do with the pots in the winter. The answer is, "Nothing". The roots of P. pungens are not damaged at temperatures of -100C when the plants are dormant, and the water needs are next to zero in winter anyway. Insufficient hydration of the plants prior to the onset of dormancy may lead to death, so I do make sure the pots get watered in autumn.


Bob

[James McGee]

Here is my idea of a rock garden.  If you do not have much, use what you have ...

The former owner dumped gravel on the side of my house to promote drainage.  The subsoil is clay and the water level is right at the soil surface in Spring.  This makes for a few very muddy months. 

I planted this area two years ago.  Do you guys recognize the Penstemon species?  If you are interested I sent lots of seed into the exchange. 

I quickly decided that I needed weed fabric under the rocks.  This project took me bits and pieces of time over the course of an entire year.  I removed the top 3 to 4 inches of gravel that had sunk into clay.  I piled the gravel clay mixture.  I used a sieve from my kitchen to wash the clay and sand out of the gravel.  I then put the clean gravel back after laying down weed fabric around the plants.  This effort has really helped keep the weeds down making this a very low maintenance garden.  My work to clean the gravel has prevented the retention of moisture.  If the weeds cannot reach moisture ... then no weeds.

I have been picking out the larger gravel and placing it around the edges.  This has created a very unnatural, but orderly boarder.  I like the way it looks.  I originally started doing this where the water drained out the other side of the garden onto my driveway.  This dam of larger sized gravel kept the pea gravel from washing onto my driveway.  I liked the look so much I decided to border the entire area with larger gravel.

If someone wanted to try something really cool, they could arrange rocks and gravel so the sizes became smaller away from the point of observation.  This would give the garden a perspective of great depth.  Of course you would also have to plant larger species in the front and smaller species in the back.  This would be the opposite of what is typically of gardeners.  If done well you could possibly achieve the feeling of depth that is captured in Lori's photo in a very small package.

The only real rock in my garden is a piece of obsidian.  I purchased it because it is dark.  I thought it would absorb the sunlight and create a place for my butterflies to get warm.  After spending $15 I discovered the butterflies preferred to warm themselves on my neighbors dark roof.  Oh well, if civilization colapses at least the people of the future will have a source material for arrowheads.   


James 

[Nold]

I think the idea, promoted by some, that a rock garden has to be built with expensive stone is a huge turn-off for people thinking about starting a rock garden.
I thought about buying stone, then realized who would be the one forced to move the stone from the driveway to an artistic yet naturalistic position in the back yard, then thought about how many more plants I could put in if there weren't huge rocks in the way.
Besides, I had already achieved the desired height with the back issues of National Geographic, broken troughs, tires from cars I no longer owned, etc.

Bob

[David Sellars]

The similarity between Lori's pictures of alpines in scree and Bob's rock garden design photo is an example of the fact that alpine plants in the wild are rarely found in crevices between parallel stratified rocks.  Mountain flowers more commonly occur in scree, moraine and broken rock outcrops. While stratified rock gardens can be very attractive, a chaotic rock garden like Bob's is an alternative that more closely resembles natural plant habitats.

[Will Youngman Comrie Perthshire]

I agree you don't need lots of imported rocks to grow alpines. In the beginning use what you have available, as you become more experienced and have the space and resources then design and build your rock garden, there are plenty of great examples on this and other sites. But a word of warning once bitten by the Rock Gardening bug there is no antidote. Containers are a great way for beginners to start you can use lots of various containers, In Scotland Ian Young has devised an ingenious way to use reclaimed Polystyrene fish boxes. See Ian's article at the following link

http://www.srgc.org.uk/feature/fishbox/troughs.html