A garden rockery is a wonderful addition to a contemporary home. They offer a beautiful space to enjoy with minimum day to day maintenance, so they’re ideal for a busy household. That said, it’s worth investing time during the planning stage of creating your contemporary rock garden. Choosing the right type of stone, and of course, the perfect plants, will help you create a space to love for years to come.
There are many types of rock gardens to use as inspiration. You may choose to take inspiration from the simple shapes of a Japanese Zen Garden, or perhaps take your cues from gardening masters such as Gertrude Jekyll or William Robinson. The beauty of a rock garden is that you can create a space that is as simple or as elaborate as you like.
Choose the very best garden stones
Once you’ve decided what type of look you’d like for your garden rockery, the next step is to choose your rockery stones. For a contemporary rock garden, you may choose to adopt a more ordered, sculptural approach, rather than the naturalistic aesthetic commonly found in the more traditional style of rockery. You may choose to use a single large stone, such as this Norwegian granite boulder as a centrepiece, or perhaps choose a selection of smaller stones to arrange as a border.
Another popular concept for contemporary rock gardens is to use the space to create a series of mini sculptures. For this, you’ll need a mix of slates to use as a base, as well as larger stones for stacking into a sculptural shape.
Craft with colour
One of the best things about sourcing rockery stones from a quality supplier is the sheer range of colours you can choose from. You may choose to emulate your home environment, perhaps choosing Cotswold stone, or Welsh slate, or you may choose a complete contrast that will really stand out. It’s a good idea to have a clear idea of the colour palette you envisage. Creating harmony between the rocks, stones and plants will help create a beautiful vista that looks as though it truly belongs together.
The key consideration, especially for a contemporary rock garden, is that you want your colour palette to be carefully curated. The cheerful chaos of a traditional cottage garden, with colours from every spectrum, has no place in the contemporary rock garden. Each element needs to play a role, from rockery stones to leaves and flowers, in order to create the modern harmony that's characteristic of contemporary garden style.
Have fun with shape
Genning up on your geometry is a great way to create a sharp modern design. Contemporary design often has a strong focus on form as a vehicle for function. A simple way to do this is to keep all your borders or path edges well defined by using a range of well-cut stones; they don’t have to be perfectly straight, but they do need to be a strong shape. This homage to geometry can be enhanced by adding accent shapes such as a spherical fountain or feature arch to create destinations within your space.
Fabulous fillers
The importance of filler stones can sometimes be overlooked. It’s important to choose carefully though because these filler stones have a strong impact on the overall look of your rockery. They’ll work alongside groundcover plants like creeping thyme or low-level sedums to create a backdrop for your star pieces.
There are various options to choose from for your filler stones, from simple pea gravel to coloured slate and everything in between. If you’re keen to create a crisp, clean look for your rock garden, then you may decide to do away with the groundcover plants altogether (by nature they tend to sprawl), in which case, good quality filler stone will be a great addition to your space.
Perfect plants
Picking the plants for your rock garden is a wonderful way to create the character you want to convey. Alpine plants offer an enormous amount of colour and shape, and there is a lot of scope for creating just the look you want. Succulents offer particularly striking shapes – Aeonium is a spectacular example – and sedums are known to be particularly forgiving of the flaws of the novice gardener.
You can choose how far you want to take the modern style of your space. An unswervingly contemporary look will be created by limiting yourself to a few carefully considered colours and shapes. If you feel you’d like a slightly softer look, then introduce some floral elements. Choose plants such as dianthus, with bright star-shaped flowers and dusky blue foliage or Pulsatilla Vulgaris to add a pop of colour at particular points in your design.
Clever planting can also be used to echo the geometric shapes of your space. If, for example, you have chosen to use an arch as a focal point, this shape can be echoed by choosing a grass with a beautiful arching growth habit, or you may create a spiral effect and choose to mirror this with intricate shapes such as the rosettes of sedum spathulifolium.
We’re always here to help
Creating a garden from scratch is incredibly exciting, but it can also be a little daunting, especially if you’re new to it. A garden rockery is a great place to start and you’ll love the fact that you’ll see the results super quickly; rocks don’t need time to grow, after all!
Whether you’re a garden expert who knows exactly what they are looking for or a complete newcomer to the wonderful world of rock gardens, you can be sure our friendly team will help you find exactly what you need. We have a super range of garden stones, including rustic slate, Black Mountain slate and warm Yorkstone.
Our décor packs are a great way to introduce an accent colour, and when they're paired with a carefully curated planting scheme, they work beautifully to create a stylish, contemporary space that’s made to be admired.
