A rock garden is a beautiful, restful place, and requires no maintenance - no water or mowing or feeding. Some gardens are meant to be spiritual, others are spiritual only in their beauty.

It’s time to break out of the everyday landscaping design. What does your lawn consist of? Lots of green grass - that takes a lot of time to mow and a lot of water to look healthy, trees and shrubs. Perhaps some flowerbeds flanking the house itself.

But there’s so much more you can do with your landscaping, if you just decide to do things a bit differently.

In desert locations, of course, like Arizona and Mexico, why bother to try to force grass to grow at all? Why not simply cover your yard with attractive, ornamental rock and stone, with a few shrubs. Or as the joke has it, “I’m retired, I’ve mowed my last lawn!” The reason is simple - you may think water is a renewable resource - but it doesn’t renew as fast as mankind is consuming it. In desert states where water comes from below ground aquifers, the level of this fresh-water source is lowering every year, and rainwater cannot replenish that level fast enough.

Even if you don’t live in a desert climate, there’s no reason why you can’t make a rock garden - either large or small - in part of your yard. Such a garden will cut down on the time needed to mow your lawn, there’ll be no need to spread pesticides around, and it will be a quiet and restful place around which to sit.

Like any other landscaping element, a rock garden does have to be planned carefully. Rock doesn’t absorb water - so any rain run-off will go straight into your lawn and does need to be carefully drained off. Don’t put your rock garden over electrical or phone lines, either.

You may think that a rock garden is equivalent to a Japanese garden, but that isn’t necessarily the case. The Japanese garden combines three elements: stone which represents mountains or islands, water - representing purity, and plants. A Zen garden is what most people think of when they hear the term Japanese garden - a stretch of white sand with black rocks placed strategically about, and one meditates by raking the sand smooth.

There are two ways to install a rock garden…one would be to make the rock look like a natural outcropping of http://bedrock…used to cut off an inconvenient slope. The more usual design is to pile up the stones - both large and small - in harmonious groupings…and if you simply must have greenery, leave small gaps between the rocks into which the plants may be placed.

Surf the web to get ideas for how to design your rock garden, and venture far and wide, into sites from Japan and India as well as the United States. You’ll find beauty everywhere.

About the Author:

Andrew Caxton is the editor of many articles on lawn care published at http://www.lawn-mowers-and-garden-tractors.com . A focused website that offers the best articles on landscaping and gardening design.

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GARDENS

If you do not want to create a flower garden, you can create a rock garden instead. Rock gardens may seem simple to set-up, but you will still have to weed and keep other debris from ruining the look of the garden. If you have rocky gardens, you will benefit from a rock garden.

In order to create a rock garden, you will need:

Rocks
Rake
Sand or mulch
Vine plants

When designing you garden, you should draw a map that should include the size of the garden, and placement of the rocks and other items. When building your rock garden, you should follow these simple instructions:

Clear the area of rocks, weeds, grass and other debris that may be on the ground. You can choose to till the soil or just let it be. You will have to wed the area even after you place the rocks.

Find rocks of different sizes. You can find them in your yard, in someone else?s yard, at the park, or while traveling. You should use a variety of different rocks that are also different colors. If you want, you can buy different colored gravel and create a small Zen-like rock garden.

Place your rocks the way you want in the area.

Add mulch if you will be planting vines or plants. Hearty vines and plants will look great in your rock garden.

Clear your rock garden of weeds as soon as you see growth. This will make clearing them easier.

Rock gardens can be fun, whimsical, and creative. You can build a rock garden that will also serve as a drainage system for your lawn. A dry creek bed will make the perfect rock garden and also keep water from clogging the soil in your yard. Build the drainage system at the bottom of a slope and dig a small trench. You can decorate the trench with rocks as well.

If you do not like traditional landscaping, you can try a rock garden. They are inexpensive and easy to set up. You will have to weed, but that?s about it. Many people who do not want a lawn that they have to take care of every day will create large rock gardens. They are decorative and functional at the same time.

Check out our huge selection of home and garden fountains, birdbaths, planters and statues. Just choose a catagory on the left or type what your looking for in the search box. You can also go to our main store at Home & Garden Fountains