Introduction
River rocks come in all kinds of shapes, shades, and textures. They can completely transform your landscape if used the right way. When you have a design in mind, you can search for “landscape companies near me” and hire professionals to execute those ideas. If you don’t know where to start, you can use the following design tips for inspiration.
The Details
1. Rock garden
A rock garden is usually made from boulders or pebbles or a combination of both. That doesn’t need to change. However, you can modify the traditional rock garden design with river stones as the base. Your plants would pop out in the garden when you have river rocks making up a high-contrast ground cover.
Otherwise, you can make the rock garden entirely out of river stones. You can make a rock garden of differently sized river stones of various colors. This kind of garden isn’t just great for aesthetics, but also good for drought-prone areas.
2. Jazz up the moon garden
A moon garden is supposed to shimmer and thrive when moonlight highlights the intoxicating blooms and white flowers under the starry sky. You can take this to another level with river stones.
Just lay down river stones to form edges and paths around the moon garden to enhance the glow of the moonlight. The moonlight would reflect off the rocks and give your garden that extra shimmering shine. Make sure to get river stones that have bright shades of white. Dark-colored river stones would absorb most of the moonlight.
3. Make a dry creek bed
It is difficult to fit rounded river stones snugly together to form a compact structure. Usually, that’s only possible with crushed gravel and stone chippings. However, the same feature makes the rounded river stones excellent for drainage. Water can easily flow between these stones and make its way into the ground.
So, you can make a dry creek bed with these river stones. This can improve your drainage drastically and reduce runoff. That means you won’t lose topsoil from your garden and the runoff won’t pollute the surroundings nor damage your basement or home’s foundation.
4. Erosion control
As mentioned above, river rocks help with drainage. The same feature also makes them great at controlling soil erosion. If erosion has been a major problem in your landscape, you can easily solve it with river rocks. If your landscape has areas that are particularly prone to erosion or has naturally flowing water, install river rocks around the edges of the creek to prevent erosion during heavy rainfall.
5. Build a walkway
You can also use river rocks for building an elegant and practical pathway. However, you need to be tactful here. If you use large river rocks, you will have a hard time with footing. Instead, you need to source river rocks, mostly small and some large stones buried deeper into the ground to create a beautiful, yet mostly flat surface.
When you walk on this pathway, you’ll see the same river rocks and hear the clacking sounds you expect without losing your footing. Using river stones also helps to maintain a more natural look for the yard.
6. River stone planters
River stones don’t need to be just used on the landscape itself. You can also use river stones to create beautiful accessories for your landscape for visible contrast and interest. For instance, if you have a walkway made with paving stones and a garden area and a home with a modern design that has a lot of sharp edges and straight lines, anything made of river stones easily stands out.
One of those decorative accessories is river stone planters. Flip a regular empty planter upside down and use a hot glue gun to secure river stones to the bottom and walls of the pot. You may spend a bit of time figuring out the right arrangement of rocks. However, once you’re done, you’ll get planters made of river stones that are unique to your garden.
7. River stone boot tray
Doing gardening chores is necessary and rewarding. However, the boots can get very dirty and muddy when you spend a lot of time in the garden, especially on wet soil. Your indoor mat may fail to track out all the dirt from the gardening boots. That’s where the rover rock tray comes in.
You can keep this tray outside the home in a visible place with a small planter to complement it. It would belong with your landscape even if it’s not a part of it. Use a heavy rubber boot tray as the foundation and hot glue stones to that. You can also drill two holes under the tray to drain away excess water.
8. River stone art
You may have seen people using concrete paving blocks to create art on their driveway, walkway, and other parts of their landscape. You can do the same with river stones. However, it would be a lot more challenging and difficult. Since river stones don’t come stained like concrete, you’ll need to source river stones of various shades for even a small project.
That means a lot of river stones are going to be useless and you’ll need to come up with clever tricks to use them in other parts of the garden. This will also take a lot of patience since you’ll need to draft a plan to build a river stone art on the landscape and sort out the right-sized and shaded river stones for the task. Just making a simple river stone bird on a river stone pathway would take a lot of time, planning, and effort. Make sure you’re prepared for such elaborate projects.
Conclusion
River rocks are tough and durable, and since they naturally come in all sorts of variations, you can use them to decorate your landscape in many ways. The above-mentioned ideas should help you come up with your own. When you have your own idea, you can search for “landscape companies near me” and hire pros to decorate your landscape the way you want.
