A rocky garden decorated with a flower garden is a fairly common element of many garden plots. The decorative appeal and ease of caring for the rock garden are the reason for the popularity of this element of landscape design. Rock plants for an alpine slide always visually enliven the stone composition, but at the same time retain the effect of a natural mountain landscape.
It is not difficult to create a stone composition that will become a spectacular decoration of a suburban area. To do this, when choosing plants for a “rocky garden”, you must adhere to the following recommendations:
- When creating a composition, preference should be given to compact and stunted forms of plants that correspond to the proportional dimensions of the slide itself.
- The choice of plants should be carried out taking into account their resistance to local conditions: soil, climate.
- When choosing a place for rooting, it is important to take into account the plant’s attitude to sunlight: sunny areas are for light-loving representatives of the plant world, shaded areas are for shade-tolerant ones.
- The intensity of growth and tillering of certain species is an important point, the lack of which can lead to the death of the “neighbors” of the rapidly growing plant.
- When creating compositions, it is important to take into account the characteristics of each of the plant inhabitants of the rock garden in order to avoid “unfavorable neighborhood”. For example: very attractive and unpretentious in care Yaskolka, Soapyka, Rezuha and Aubrietta have a bad effect on their “neighbors”.
- It is advisable to plant a plant taking into account their “community of interests”: they should be combined with each other not only in appearance, but in the similarity of growing conditions, growth and development rates, and flowering rhythm.
The material on choosing suitable stones for an alpine slide will also be useful:
When choosing perennial flowers for landscaping an alpine slide, you should focus not only on the location of the rock garden on the site, but also on the general style of the composition
The most effective combination is given by combinations of herbaceous perennials with shrub and tree-like forms, decorated with variegated rugs of flowering creeping species and juicy green strokes of evergreen and decorative leafy species
Slow-growing woody and low-growing plants are ideal plants for a “rocky garden”. Conifers for an alpine slide provide a high decorative composition throughout the year.
In miniature stone compositions, creeping and dwarf forms of conifers look great: miniature Canadian spruce “Conica”, black pine “Nana”, scaly juniper “Blue Carpet”, western thuja “Danica”
Combining conifers with different crown shapes and needles in one composition, you can significantly enhance the picturesque effect.
You can learn how to properly arrange a composition of decorative conifers from the material:
Among the deciduous shrubs for the alpine slide, the clear favorites are the decorative forms of barberry, cotoneaster, chaenomeles, spirea
It is difficult to imagine a rock garden without flowers. Beautifully flowering perennials for an alpine slide allow you to give any garden a unique style and uniqueness. When creating compositions, the choice is not limited only to plants characteristic of the alpine terrain. In the “rocky garden”, representatives of the flora, whose main habitat are forests and the sea coast, will also look appropriate.
A bright decoration of a rock garden can be: Arends’s saxifrage, subulate phlox, herbaceous edelweiss, alpine edelweiss, balearic gerbil, evergreen Iberis, Carpathian bell and many others.
The top of the alpine slide
The upper tier of the “rocky garden” is planted, as a rule, with drought-resistant and sun-loving plant species, since this area is most open to sunlight, but moisture in the soil layer is practically not retained. When decorating the top of the composition, ground cover plants are used.
You can learn more about the best ground cover perennial plants for the garden from the material:
Perennial carnation and eternally green Iberis can become a bright decoration of the top.
A fluffy carpet of Iberis will cover the top with snow-white flowers in May-June, pillow-like carnation bushes will delight with abundant flowering and a pleasant aroma throughout the summer
The sun-loving edelweiss growing on the slopes of inaccessible mountains can become the main decoration of the rock garden, and the lush purple rugs of creeping thyme will attract many bees and butterflies with the honey scent of flowers
Middle tier of a stone composition
Plants that prefer sunny areas, but at the same time easily tolerate light shading, can decorate the middle part of the rocky hill. At the middle level, the soil moisture is higher. This makes it possible to expand the range of plants for decoration with moisture-loving beauties.
In the days of May, the subulate phlox will sparkle with a riotous color of pink, blue and snow-white shades. An effective background for phlox can be a woolly chisel with pleasant to the touch silvery pubescent leaves
Noble silver shades also have three-veined anaphalis and Schmidt’s wormwood.
Aubrietta is a versatile plant for landscaping, because in addition to gorgeous flowering in the summer months, it has decorative foliage, the richness of color and attractiveness of which remains throughout the year.
At the end of May, the blooming beauty will be taken over by the cultural beauty, pleasing the eye with lush streams of pale pink, rich crimson and dark purple flowers
Well suited for the middle tier and unpretentious in the care of the sunflower monotonous dwarf shrub. In sunny areas of the tier, you can place all kinds of stonecrops, which are formed into cute pillow-like bushes, decorated with miniature flower stars in the summer months
If you choose among the names of flowers for an alpine slide that feels comfortable in our latitudes, then the slopes of the slide can be decorated with all kinds of bulbous, various heucheras, dense bushes of armeria, tender alpine aster, primroses, primroses, beautiful autumn-flowering crocus.
Rock garden foot
At the foot, plants are planted that like to grow in rich moisture-saturated soil and are not afraid of shading.
Color accents at the foot of the composition can be set using compact saxifrage bushes and spike-shaped Liatris flowers
The lower tier is also allocated for the placement of tree and shrub plants. Often on this part of the hill, group plantings of miniature dwarf conifers, rhododendrons are placed.
