25 Creative Rock Garden Ideas to Consider for Your Own Yard

From a complete rock garden to subtle gravel accents, pair landscaping with hardscaping for a unique look.

ock gardens are a beautiful and low-maintenance way to bring dimension to your landscape. Incorporating stone in your garden—whether small gravel, large boulders, smooth river rocks, or flat flagstone—allows you to add natural texture and visual interest to accent your flowers, trees, and shrubs. Rock gardens are also a great opportunity to highlight native plants, as these varieties can often live among or on rocks and thrive with little to no supplemental irrigation. What’s more, these stones can be used in places where grass won’t grow (or in lieu of turf altogether), providing a beautiful and sustainable alternative to more traditional landscaping.

Add Low Growing Plants

Low-growing plants in rock garden — COURTESY OF MT. CUBA CENTER

Ground covers, like phlox, are a great choice in a rock garden, as they are usually drought-tolerant, relatively low maintenance, and can help choke out weeds. “Carpets of colorful Phlox subulata (moss phlox) brighten rock gardens in the spring, and the semi-evergreen foliage adds texture throughout the rest of the year,” says Vic Piatt, senior garden advisor at Mt. Cuba Center. “This plant thrives in rock gardens and slopes, environments similar to where it can be found in nature.”

Use Large Boulders

Large boulders in rock garden — BUBBLEA / GETTY IMAGES

Don’t be afraid to incorporate large boulders in your landscape. “Large boulders are the perfect stand-alone design element for a rock garden,” says Piatt. “The shape, color, texture, and positioning of the boulders bring an element of intrigue.”

Spanish garden with stone and rock accents, with flowers in foreground

Creating a water feature in your garden is made easy with larger rocks. A hilly outcropping on this property offers an ideal spot for a collection of boulders installed at different heights and surrounded by pink flowering shrubs, soft grass, and growing vines. The natural slope of the garden allows a small waterfall to run into a pond.

Make a Zen Garden

traditional zen rock garden with sand and moss

In a Japanese Zen garden, paved pathways and large trees border a central focal point, where oversized stones sit in a bed of smaller pebbles or sand raked into a rippled wave design.

Add Steps

close-up of rock steps in desert garden — GETTY / ANNBALDWIN

In this tiered garden, flat stones form steps while gravel and smaller, smooth stones offer a visual contrast. On each layer, plant drought-tolerant varieties, like ornamental grasses and Mediterranean plants to complete the arid look.

Add Rocks to a Hillside

sloped landscape in rock garden — COURTESY OF MT. CUBA CENTER

If you have a sloped landscape, a rock garden is the ultimate way to help control runoff. “The rock garden on a sloped landscape has the effect of holding the water in place a little longer, then more slowly disperses it into the landscape and ground,” says Piatt.

Make a Raised Bed

Rocks are a great medium for raised beds, which are ideal for landscapes with poor soil quality or gardeners with mobility issues. “If the gardener has flat stones, they could create a dry-laid stone wall,” says Piatt. “If the rocks are more dimensional, such as 1 to 1 1/2 feet tall and wide, they could be laid end-to-end in the desired shape of the bed. Mixing the two stone types is an opportunity to be creative.”