For a gentle slope or berm that connects a wooded area with your open lawn, create a smooth transition with groundcovers that naturalize and create a colorful carpet. This is helpful if you're including a variety of plants in your garden, some of which need more water than others. How to Make a Shady Rockery in Your Garden Transform a dull, shady corner into a rockery for spring interest. If a rocky slope is your problem area, then a rock garden design presents itself naturally enough as a landscape solution. It is best to use the same type of rock to maintain a uniform, natural appearance. By using carefully placed rocks you can mimic these conditions in miniature: a large rock set at the right angle will create both north- and south-facing slopes, for example. How to create a rock garden Rock gardens are a budget-friendly way to turn a steep slope or tiny lawn into something beautiful. If you live in a region dominated by drought, you may even wish to build a rock garden on flat land, planting the rock crevices with drought-tolerant plants to form a xeriscape. Proper choice of the plants shall expose the beauty of the stone. Designing a beautiful rock garden should not be difficult, if you can get an area with a few rocks, all you need to add is plants that can thrive under those conditions and with a few touches, you have your rock garden ready. Not only are they hard to maintain otherwise (just ask anyone who has tried to mow a hillside lawn) but it is also easy to integrate rocks into a slope and make it look as though they were put there by Mother Nature. The beautiful rock garden design ideas shared here will equip you with more insight on how to come up with that beautiful garden. Steep rocky slopes lend themselves well to rock gardens filled with perennials that require little soil for their roots. The beautiful rock garden design ideas shared here will equip you with more insight on how to come up with that beautiful garden. For making this raised bed to build a rock garden you should use large rocks for the bottom, and smaller ones for the top. Steep banks and slopes. A shady rock garden looks better in the form of a gently sloping hill. How to Build a Rock Garden with Weed Prevention.