If you've ever seen a miniature "Zen garden," you know that rock gardens can come in any size. You can design a perfectly pleasing rock garden for yourself in many small spaces, from an apartment patio to a narrow side yard to a rooftop retreat. Apply the same design principles as you would for a full-size garden, using contrasting colors and textures and harmonizing individual elements to create a unified look. Does this Spark an idea?
Play With Scale
When planning a small rock garden, you can use many tricks to either highlight or downplay the space's unusually diminutive scale. If you'd like to create the appearance of a larger space, you might use slightly smaller pebbles than you would normally select. Especially across an expanse of rocks, where the eye has no other reference points, a greater number of smaller pebbles will make the garden appear larger. Alternately, if you design a rock garden with stones of varied sizes, ranging from boulders to tiny pebbles, you can more easily draw the eye along vertical lines. If you'd like a small space to showcase a lot of different plants, first build up the earth into a slope, and then use large and small stones as a series of "steps." You'll pack more plantings into your mountainous rock garden than you would on a flat bed.
Low-Maintenance Gardening
If you're starting with a small space, you're already halfway to having the ideally low-maintenance rock garden. To make your plantings even easier to care for, consult with your local horticultural extension service and local nurseries about native plants. By planting native flora among your stones, you'll have fewer problems with insects or diseases, you'll need to water less and your plants will tolerate the climactic highs and lows of your area. In addition to your area's native varieties, some low-maintenance standbys do well in a broad range of climates, including Irish moss, Hens and chicks and California fuschia are all resilient and drought-resistant options.
Add Some Color
Your rock garden's small size needn't limit your imagination when it comes to color. Take inspiration from the planting style of cottage gardens where many flowering plants provide a broad spectrum of colors at multiple levels. In your rock garden, plant such flowering species as Carpet bugle with blue and purple flowers; Mountain alyssum, with yellow blooms; Kinnikinick, with red fruits and white flowers, tinged with red; and the Sea Pink, a grass-like plant with flowers ranging in color from white to pink to purple.
