Easy to maintain crevice garden

Crevice gardens

Crevice gardens are very popular today in Colorado. With the help of our landscaping team, your beautiful new crevice garden will be a showcase of sculptural rock with alpine and even rare plants.

Have you ever seen plants thriving and growing up through a crack in the sidewalk? That’s the idea behind crevice gardens. It is a style of rock gardening which is essentially paving a raised bed with rocks and planting plants in those little spaces or crevices.

Advantages

Crevice gardens have several benefits including:

The ability to grow plants that don’t thrive in other types of environments.

Plants grow vertically between rock edifices to expand garden square footage.

Using rock arrangements, you can cultivate both shade and sun-loving plants.

Directing water flow through rocks and roots provides easy maintenance.

While beautiful and easy to maintain, designing and building crevice gardens can be a little more complex. But we love a challenge, and the end results are so amazing, it’s worth it.

We’ll work with you about the need to protect the crevice garden plants from nearby trees that compete for water and litter the garden with leaves. A natural-looking yet functional rock formation is an important component to properly plan a crevice garden.

Design

  • Other design considerations for crevice gardens include:
  • Use the right base material to prevent weather damage.
  • Lock rocks into a structural formation for added support.
  • Carefully place and bury rocks to create planting pockets.
  • Build in microclimates to support a variety of plant types.
  • For larger gardens, add steppingstones or access points.
  • Use proper bare-root planting methods to prevent shock.

Colorado Gardens

Colorado is a leader in crevice gardening, with many crevice gardens on display at the Denver Botanic Gardens including, a large, south-facing xeric for steppe flora, a north-facing garden for alpines, and a partly shady, north-facing garden for Primula, Saxifraga and other shade-loving Colorado species.

Building a Crevice Garden

Crevice garden plants are generally smaller in size. Water is funneled down through the rocks and encourages deeper root growth, while the top of the plant stays dry. Once your crevice garden is built, not much landscape maintenance is required.

When choosing the location for a new crevice garden, a site with little competition from nearby trees is best. Tree roots may grow into the garden and compete with the plants for the water and falling leaves into the garden can cause maintenance trouble. Your garden can be incorporated into the build of a natural water feature to provide a balance to the hardscape.

The foundation where the rocks are placed is usually builder’s sand or concrete sand. A 50/50 mix of sand and gravel with no organic material is also used sometimes. This allows drainage but also protects the rocks from frost heave in the winter. Gravel goes on top, keeping the sand from washing away. The rocks must be buried deep enough so they won’t tip over. The rocks should be placed touching each other and lock into the others, keeping them in place. This allows planting pockets between the stones in the small spaces. One inch is the target crevice length. Smaller plants, such as cacti, dwarf shrubby plants, and alpines are the best options.

What is a crevice garden? After working with our landscapers at J&S Landscape in Longmont, you will have a beautiful rock garden featuring alpine and rare plants growing from the crevices between the rocks. To learn more and plan your own crevice garden, feel free to get in touch.

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