Rock gardens, building an attractive native Rock Garden is not so hard!Building a rock garden is very good way of filling up a spare corner, or a mound of rubble, or any area of your native garden that you would like to be different. If you have a wall, embankment, ledge, mound, or retaining wall it can easily be turned into an native plant rock garden. Or you can bring in some rocks and judiciously arrange them in an attractive, natural setting. Add gravel or small stones to fill in between the rocks.
Australian native plants are superb in a rock garden. Scrambling and prostate grevilleas and banksias are excellent plants, and improved varieties of these can be purchased from native plant nurseries with several different flower colors. They will flower year round too.
Clumps of lomandra or dianella, native grasses such as kangaroo or wallaby grass, and kangaroo paws, add beauty and attract small birds too. Generally you would plant natives that liked warm and dry conditions. Just fill any holes or hollows in the rock garden with good soil and plant your native plants. Cascading natives like the grevilleas mentioned above, you would plant over ledges. Grasses, just plonk them in any gaps, they especially look good around the edges. A few small ground cover plants or native daisies will add much to the garden.
One of the best natural rock gardens we have seen recently is only a few metres from the Sydney Opera House. Walking into the Sydney Botanical Gardens from the Opera House, on the righthand side, opposite the seawall, native cascading and sprawling plants have been incorporated into the sandstone escarpment.
This is a very good example of how to set up a rock garden. Of course, not everyone will have an escarpment in their backyard, but using native plants it's possible in any garden to set up a very attractive rock garden area that will be pleasing to look at, and will attract small birds, butterflies, and other native animals.
|
