Creative Rock Garden Ideas for Challenging Areas

The first patch we converted from lawn in our garden was the dreaded “right of way” area of our front yard, which sees heavy foot traffic and deposits of winter salt and ice left by city ploughs, where I thought no plants would ever survive a winter season.

My solution for the space was to design a multi level rock garden, beneath the large Crimson maple that came with my house (would never be my choice of a front yard tree but it’s there and as old as my house so we roll with it).

This first rock garden came together quickly using dug up and flipped over pieces of lawn piled on top of each other, and random rocks and large stones found on our property and kindly donated to our cause. We worked so hard to landscape this area, and two years later it’s become a thriving ecosystem with a life of its own, and I realised we could have built this rock garden in half the time with less than a quarter of the effort if I knew then what I know now. (More on lawn conversions later, in another post).

Here are some pictures from our rock garden this year (year 2)

Rock gardens are one of our favourite garden patches to design, as they allow for so much creativity and artistic licence in incorporating hardscapes, found natural materials and purposeful and accidental levelling alongside careful selection and placement of suitable plants, ground covers and focal plants.