Video:How to Design a Rock Garden

Transcript:How to Design a Rock Garden

Hi, I'm Eric King, registered landscape architect, and we're out here at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens to learn about designing a rock garden for your yard.

Rock Gardens in Nature

Rock gardens are beautiful tiny little mosaic of colors, shapes and sizes, gardens that are perfect for a yard that has a small amount of space but has full sun and a steep slope. Well, designing it can be a little bit tricky but what helps is if you can think about how they occur in nature. Rock gardens by definition have a lot of rocks and they often grow with plants way up in the high altitude, but because of the really harsh conditions, the sun, and the wind and the environment that they're in, a lot of the plants tend to be stunted and small, spreading, surrounding the rocks that help anchor them in place. So if you're going to do one in your yard, remember that.

Choose Location for Rock Garden

So the first thing to consider when designing your own rock garden is location. Location, location, location. You want a nice, steep slope. It may be a place in your yard where nothing else seems to grow. And close to people because you're going to put a lot of time and energy into working on it. So you want to make sure that you enjoy it up close.

Work Out Design for Rock Garden

Then you get to laying out the rocks. And I encourage you to always work out your designs first on paper. It's a whole lot easier to erase on a piece of paper than to move a rock out in the field. So sketch out your designs. When you're laying your rocks out, you want to think how nature would do it. Nature is random, unpredictable big groupings of rocks, maybe a few small ones scattered around. So you echo that in your design. A lot of variety.

Use a Variety of Rocks in Rock Garden

Think about it in terms of a person. You want to have some rocks that are upright more like a person standing, some that are more rounded like a person sitting, and some that are pretty flat like a person laying down. You want to stick with the same basic type of rock but you want to use different sizes and shapes. And then you want to scatter them around in a random order. Not on a grid. Not like they plopped down from the sky on this perfect little arrangement but random groupings.

Make Sure to Partially Bury Rocks

The last thing you're going to have to bury as much as a third of the rock underground. And you do that so that the rock doesn't look like it just plopped down from the sky and is sitting there.

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