Bulbaholics Way of Building a Rockery

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Creating a Rockery Bulbaholic’s way
Following a question by Avkg47 I felt prompted to write a blog on how we construct our ‘raised bed’ rockeries.

All our rockeries are designed in a similar manner to this sketch. Walls of any height at the sides to contain the soil, drainage at the bottom and compost on top. The sketch is for a planted wall but it can be as wide as you wish and any shape.

Firstly we need somewhere to build the rockery. When I was working the second car was parked here but now that we only need one vehicle there is space for another garden:-)). This space has been used for parking since the motor vehicle was invented. All I am doing here is breaking up the compacted soil and gravel to allow drainage.

We need stones! I have been collecting stone from three counties on my travels for the last twenty years. If you are not as lucky as I then I am afraid that you will have to buy your stone from a quarry or similar.
This picture is a project from about 2004 when I was constructing a boundary wall in the same manner as the current rockery.

We also need a compost to fill the rockery. My mix for the garden is three or four parts soil, one part humus and one part of small grit.
How much material will I need? The rockery will be 3m x 3m and half a meter high. Looking at it now I would estimate there is about 4 or 5 cu.m of compost (4soil:1 humus:1 grit) and 2 or 3 cu.m of stone. It is very difficult to calculate exactly how much you will need as there are so many variables.

The base of a rockery is a good place to get rid of rubbish! This should be clean bits of stone with no mortar attached. Make sure that the rubble is mixed with compost so that there are no voids. Soil will trickle down to fill the voids and the surface of your rockery will collapse after a few years. Here, I am helping out a neighbour by getting rid of some cobbles for him.
If there had been good soil beneath the site then I would have dug this out and filled the excavation with rubbish. The soil could then be used on top of the rockery.

At last we can see something happening. I have laid my first layer of stone wall and started to fill in with compost. I am using ‘rubbishy’ stuff at the bottom and will top off with better quality compost.

We are now up to the second level of stone at the front. This is as high as this ‘raised bed’ rockery will go although there is no reason not to build one several layers high. At the back of the picture you will see the actual boundary wall to the garden which will be retained.

The ground falls away slightly at the rear so the bottom corner needs to be slightly higher. The space available was larger than I wanted for the bed so there is now a cobble path between the new rockery and the existing wall. Some stone is being added to the top for effect.


At last, construction is completed and the first plants can be given a home in summer 2010. The plants are still small as they are what we have propagated ourselves rather than buying large plants from a nursery.

Summer 2011 and the rockery now starts to look like something although I still have more material to plant.
This is just one of the many rockeries in our garden all built on the same principle but of varying shapes and sizes. This one was chosen for the blog only because I had the foresight to take pictures as I went along.
I hope this blog gives some inspiration to GoYers to use beds of this nature in their own gardens as they are not difficult to build or maintain.

• 3 Jan, 2012
• 15 likes

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