Rock gardens offer landscaping that can withstand drought and poor soil, Virginia Cooperative Extension expert says

While traditional landscaping is made up of plants that require regular watering, fertilizer, and maintenance, a rock garden is designed to thrive in poor soil and dry conditions. If you have problematic landscape features such as a moderately steep slope, dry soil, and rocks, you have the perfect environment for a rock garden.

"A rock garden can be a way to a way to turn a small hot, dry patch into a wonderful focal point in your landscape,” according to Ed Olsen, Virginia Cooperative Extension consumer horticulture specialist.

Rock gardens mimic an alpine environment. For example, imagine you are on a long hike and you finally emerge above the tree line. You look around and see slopes with loose rocks, low-growing vegetation, and maybe a few wildflowers in crevices between boulders. A rock garden intends to recreate the feeling of this landscape.

“Rock gardening has a stigma of being complicated, but it’s not,” said Barbara Rose, a Green Spring Extension Master Gardener and member of the Potomac Valley Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society.

To create a rock garden

• Start with a small open area. An east-facing slope with poor, rocky soil is ideal.
• Adjust the soil to create a mixture of one-third each soil, small rocks, and something with good drainage, such as sand. Add some larger rocks into the soil. They can be arranged to your liking by adding a lot to create many crevices — a crevice garden — or just a few to accent the space.
• Add plants that thrive in dry conditions, experimenting to see what works for your conditions.

Rock gardens do not need applications of fertilizer because the plants derive nutrients from the rocks added to the soil.

According to Olsen, the traditional alpine plants you might imagine in a rock garden, such as saxifrages or storksbill, can be difficult to grow in Virginia’s heat and humidity. In Virginia, a few good starter-plants are phlox, sassafras, bellflowers, columbine, dwarf geraniums, pulsatilla or Easter flower, creeping thyme, agaves, yuccas, and hens and chicks.

According to Rose, the key to rock gardening is to avoid standing water.

“You have to have good drainage. We all have places that are more like rain gardens. You want the opposite for a rock garden, if you have a slope you can recreate a ‘scree’ [a mass of small, loose rocks on the side of a mountain] and build it up with sand and rocks,” said Rose.

In a changing climate, with less predictable rainfall and weather patterns, alternative gardening styles such as rock gardening offer opportunities to refresh Virginia landscapes, minimize resource needs, and create sustainable gardens for the future.

Interested in learning more about gardening? Master Gardeners bring the resources of Virginia’s land-grant universities – Virginia Tech and Virginia State University – to the people of the commonwealth. Contact your local Master Gardeners through your Extension office or learn more about gardening in Virginia and the Virginia Extension Master Gardener program.