DIY Builds
DIY Builds
Photo: Tim Douglas
No special tools are needed for planting, just a good pair of gloves to dig through the gravel and put the root ball in place. When setting the plants in the gravel, their crowns should be flush or just slightly below the top of the gravel. Remove the top inch or so of soil from the root balls before planting.
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When you conjure up an image of a gravel garden, it probably isn’t very fun or colorful. Many people picture a sea of hot, dry gravel, some harsh, craggy rocks, and a handful of plain green, sparsely growing plants. This image might be right on the money if we were talking about mountainous alpine rock gardens, but the gravel gardens that I’ve helped create here at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens are different. Why would you want to have a gravel garden? Well, for starters, you get the same beauty as a traditional perennial garden but with 80 percent less maintenance. These sustainable plant communities, once established, thrive on natural rainfall alone and require no fertilizer or other chemicals to grow. If given a little time to grow and fill in, they will look similar to traditional perennial gardens but require far less work. Next, create a solid border or hard edge around the perimeter of the garden, if one doesn’t already exist. Medium size stone, large boulders, or pavers are often used to make an edge, but the foundation of a building, a driveway, an existing sidewalk, or a concrete curb all make good edgers, too. Just be sure that the permanent border is tall enough to retain the 4 to 5 inches of gravel that will be placed atop the soil. The border is critical because the gravel needs to be kept at a consistent depth throughout the garden, right up to the edges. If it tapers off at the edges, weeds will find their way in. First, select a site that has decent soil drainage. Once you have that, you begin by removing any existing herbaceous vegetation, either mechanically or with the aid of a non-selective herbicide like glyphosate. If there are existing trees or shrubs, they can be left in place and incorporated into the gravel garden; just remove any loose soil, mulch, or other organic matter from around the crowns of the plants. The following are the steps we took when installing our gravel gardens. Though you may not want to transition your whole landscape to this concept, you can start out small and see for yourself all the advantages these types of gardens have. Once you do, you’ll be tempted to replace your entire front lawn with a gravel garden—which is exactly what I’ll be doing at home this spring! The gravel garden concept is not new, and most keen gardeners might associate it with one of the greatest gardeners of our time: Beth Chatto. Beth converted a gravel parking lot into a beautiful, drought-tolerant garden more than 25 years ago. Her gardens in Essex County, England, thrive despite a meager 20 inches of rainfall each year, inspiring many gardeners over the years—including me. Much like Beth’s gardens, the Olbrich gravel gardens are chock-full of tough, lush, and colorful plants that grow harmoniously together. The only time you can see gravel is when we cut the plants back in spring before they come back to life for another season. Some of the greatest things about our gardens, beyond their beauty, are their ease of care and their inherent environmental compatibility with our climate. Now for the gravel, and not just any gravel: Washed 1/4- to 3/8-inch quartz or granite chip gravel works best. Every piece of gravel will be relatively the same size, so if you stick to these specifications, it will remain loose and never pack tight (picture marbles in a jar). We use local gray angular quartzite or rounded pea gravel, but any stone of similar size is fine. If the planting bed is large, it’s a good idea to drive in stakes about every 4 to 5 feet. Make a mark on the stake about 5 inches above the soil line so that you can gauge the depth of the gravel as you spread it and ensure a consistent depth of 4 to 5 inches throughout the garden. This is a very important detail because the gravel acts as the barrier to weed seed germination. Too deep, and the plants perform poorly; too shallow, and the roots of weed seedlings can reach the soil below and become established in your nice, clean gravel garden.
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Establishing your plants is a bit different in a gravel bed than in a conventional perennial bed or border. Maintenance will be much easier in the long run, but getting the garden off to a good start is critical to its long-term success. The key to a good start is water, water, and more water. This seems contrary to the whole gravel garden concept, but that requirement changes as the plants root in. Once they reach maturity, they will, in turn, reach their maximum drought tolerance. Even though the plant species selected for the garden are naturally drought tolerant, they need to root deeply into the soil below the gravel to be that way. Keep in mind that the only moisture available to the plant initially is in the soil mass that it was planted with; the surrounding gravel has little to no water-holding capacity. Water the plants as if they were still in the plastic pots they were initially grown in. In the beginning, that may mean daily watering on sunny, hot, windy days. As the plants grow and root in, the watering will become less frequent. The best way to know when it’s time to water is by monitoring the plants daily. Water when you see signs of stress—most often, off-colored and wilting foliage. A good way to make it easy on yourself and your plants is to set up a temporary irrigation system that can be left in place for the first season. Hoses and impact sprinklers are relatively inexpensive and worth the investment. We do like to water by hand whenever possible to conserve this precious resource, but when we can’t, the sprinklers do a good job of quenching our plants’ thirst.
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