It's not just in the rock garden that a wall serves various purposes: it serves to fence in the property, as a privacy screen, as facade cladding or is used to divide rooms. In addition, walls are also used as a supporting element, for example on embankments, as well as as protective bank boundaries on ponds or streams.
What is a rock garden wall used for?
A rock garden wall, especially a dry stone wall, serves as a slope support, privacy screen and habitat for plants and animals. During construction, stones are stabilized without mortar and can be flexibly adjusted. Dry stone walls are suitable for room boundaries, seating walls, herb spirals, sea walls and raised beds.
Dry stone wall: home for plants and small animals
A typical element for the rock garden is the dry stone wall. Here the individual stones are not supported with mortar or similar, but instead stabilized with earth and grit. Dry stone walls usually stand at a slight angle - ideally with an angle of inclination of 10 to 15 percent - and support an embankment or slope. In this case, you do not need a deep foundation, because higher dry stone walls in particular stand on a substructure made of gravel and / or chippings. Dry stone walls can be planted and offer a valuable habitat for rock garden plants as well as many endangered animals such as lizards, common toads, mason bees, rock bumblebees, newts and ground beetles: for this reason alone, their ecological balance is significantly better than that of a wall that cannot be planted. Furthermore, dry stone walls can be flexibly dismantled and converted and subsequently corrected and repaired.
Various dry stone walls for every need
In contrast to rigid concrete walls, dry stone walls are “movable” and can compensate for minor slope movements without causing damage. Due to their unsealed construction, pressing slope water is easily drained away via the joints and the dreaded water build-up behind the walls does not occur. Aside from slope fortifications, dry stone walls are also used for
- Construction of spatial boundaries in sunken gardens
- for seat walls
- Herbal spirals
- Seawalls
- on steep pond banks
- for building raised beds
- and much more
built.
Build your own drywall: This is how it's done
You can also make a low dry stone wall yourself. Sometimes, for example, garden centers or larger garden centers also offer workshops where practice walls are built under professional guidance. However, inexperienced wall builders should rather outsource larger projects to gardening and landscaping companies. However, you can see how to build a simple, low dry stone wall to support a slope here:
- First of all you need stones and filling material.
- Depending on the type of rock, you will need around 1 ton of dry stone stones per 3 square meters of wall.
- The backfill is calculated as follows: wall height x wall length x 0.6 gives the backfill in cubic meters.
- Use gravel, grit and topsoil as the foundation and backfill.
- The individual stones are “jointed” together with rock garden soil and grit.
- You can put the plants in there while building the wall.
- Planting becomes more difficult later.
- Build in layers, starting with a corner or curb.
- All stones must not wobble, but must lie flat and firmly on top of each other.
- Avoid cross joints as these destabilize the wall.
- Cover stones close off the masonry at the top.
Tip
In and with dry stone walls you can create great seating, raised beds and/or details such as small niches for placing vases, pots or bowls as well as stairs.
