Rock gardening has been coined as the most captivating of all forms of gardening. It’s definitely true that it possesses a fascination of its own and that in recent years more and more people have been caught up in the spell of it and are seeking information concerning rock gardening.
What is a rock garden?
It is rational to assume that it is a garden in which rocks are an important characteristic. Yes this description is barely specific enough. For although rock gardening is a moderately new type of gardening and is less well defined than other types, the term “rock gardening” has nevertheless already come to mean not only a garden built with rocks, but also a specific style of gardening, employing plants of certain kinds and with explicit characteristics.
It is true that there are several diverse forms of rock gardens. They vary in size from a few square feet to acres in size. In formation and implementation they also range from those of maximum minimalism to those intricately complex and incidentally, in price from a few dollars to hundreds. But any authentic rock garden worthy of the name will be instantaneously identified as such, whether it graces a corner of the lawn of the most humble cottage or the slanting hillside of a millionaire’s manor.
One may spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars in stockpiling stones, setting out plants, and arranging garden fountains without achieving an actual rock garden. Rocks and plants alone, regardless of how prodigally provided, will not guarantee the formation of the object we are after.
The first fundamental of a genuine rock garden—no matter what scale it is built upon—is that it look natural. Any attempt which falls short of this becomes at best purely a compilation of rock plants, which is very unlike an authentic
rock garden.
Fortunately this vital effect of naturalness in rock garden making is not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon the magnitude of the garden. It is true that with ample room to work in, one may generate results which on a small scale would not be feasible. Yet a truly fascinating rock garden may be built in a very limited vicinity.
At some of the recent flower shows, there have been a few outstanding examples of rock gardens covering but a few square yards of demonstration space—even though it must be admitted that most of these displays labeled “rock gardens” are anything but! Once in awhile however, one comes across a real-life planting which proves that a very small but legitimate rock garden is a possibility.
These are not as numerous, it is true; but they are adequately recurrent to prove that it can be done. The various small rock gardens which one sees, unacceptable from an imaginative point of view, are the effect of lack of information, or of experience, on the part of the gardener, rather than of any existent difficulties in the method of preparation or planting.
Rock gardening is in countless ways particularly tailored to the adornment of very limited areas. With an appropriate selection of resources, plants, and outdoor water features, it may be made the most minute of any form of gardening and yet it is in no way toy gardening, for even the smallest rock garden may have pride, personality, and appeal.
Rock gardening is conceivably the most personal of all kinds of gardening; almost certainly in no other does the gardener become so well aware of his plants, or enter into such secure relationship with them. The plants themselves, with hardly any exceptions, hold strong personalities. They do not have such enormous nor such stunning colored blooms as most of the flowers with which are more common.
In fact, many of them have petite blossoms and depend upon a collection of these to create the breathtaking splashes of color which they bring to the garden depiction. Others increase the appeal which they hold for most people only upon rather close contact, but indisputably develop it. Their quaintness, their resoluteness, their contagious exuberance, their bashfulness,—or honestly bold brazenness, despite their tiny size,—are traits which give them a persona not possessed to the same scale by any other assembly of plants.
It is undeniably the enthrallment which these modest plants have, as well as the likelihood of using them, in correlation with rocks and outdoor statuary to produce gorgeous garden pictures, that has given rise to the current surprising interest in rock gardening.
This interest is not a passing trend or garden style. Rock gardening, while its esteem is reasonably recent, is a sound, rational, and entirely realistic kind of gardening, which is sure to become more and more extensively taken up and earnestly followed by American gardeners.
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