Rock gardening or scree beds

I would like to try growing some various alpines and miniatures which require a rock gardening set up. How do I get started? Our soil has plenty of clay and I do amend but any ideas on rock gardens or scree beds?

Unless you want to do some heavy landscaping you might like to try some shallow containers.

What plants are you thinking of starting with? Sometimes growing plants from the same or a similar region will help you make a choice on how to do that bit of the garden

Baa, I have a small peculiarly shaped bed that I was considering turning into an experimental rock garden, it is about 10 feet by 4 feet on two sides, the other side is a diagonal about 15 feet and then straight back to the first side with another 10 feet. I would like to be able to grow successfully like lithodora, daphne cneorum, lewisia, androsace, soapwort, some creeping phloxes, some pleione. In that space I now have some iris reticulata and another taller bulbous iris, a snowball tree.

Thanks

The Lithodora will need acid soil, the others will prefer a more neutral situation. The Lewisia and Androsace will cope better being planted on their sides or at an angle (to prevent water sitting on the leaves) so immediately we know you will need to create an acid soil pocket and have a few stones you can plant into.

If you want to plant into the bed itself, you will need to incorporate a lot of grit and sand (the grit will need to be of a neutral stone), slow release fertiliser like bone meal is great as the plants won't want a rich soil and clay is usually good at keeping hold of nutrients. If you go for the scree bed you might like to step it slightly or slope to aid water runoff.

Our soil here in the Pacific NW tends to be acidic. I have raised the lithodora before but I usually kill it because my soil hasn't drained well enough. I think Lewisia is a Oregon native named for Lewis of Lewis and Clark, the early explorers of this region.

So,Baa you are saying basically to incorporate the sand and grit into my soil and bury larger rocks into the soil. I was thinking of getting some pea gravel and incorporating some of it into the soil and using it as a kind of mulch.

This message was edited Feb 22, 2004 4:30 PM

Lenjo it's up to you. I personally wouldn't bury larger rocks but place them in the gravel so they appear to be coming out of the ground, depends on how stable the soil is in the region, shape of rock and what the safety hazards could be.

It seems as if you already had a good picture of what you want to do. I hope we will see the photos of the completed work :)