USING THE ROCKS YOU HAVE
It can be expensive if you have to buy rocks for your rock garden. Especially if your rockery is of any size, and I'm talking about a rockery where the rocks and stones predominate, and the plants are in crevices or small spaces between the rocks... Not just some rocks placed here and there in a regular garden.
I tend to like each rockery to be made with the same kind of rocks... Either granite-like rocks or limestone rocks. This gets harder to do if you are using rocks at hand or found rocks. Sometimes you can cheat a little.
I built a little ridge that is topped by some real, found limestone rocks, but the bulk of the stone is actually broken concrete from an old patio that my neighbour ripped up. The usual colour of concrete matches limestone very closely. I called this rockery the Rubble Ridge.
In other areas where I have used rocks from my own property plus other found rocks, the rockery becomes a mix. A lot of the larger granite type rock was found near the surface of our one acre property. Some I believe were from an old barn foundation, as they had bits of cement attached to them, and others seemed to have been deposited in our sand dune like hills by glaciers.
I call this raised rockery 'The Trailer Hill' because it is up against out old travel trailer that has become our garden shed. There are a few other rocks there including a few flat limestones that provide a place I can place pots.
The original purpose and planting of the Trailer Bed involved some various hardy geranium seedlings from seed supplied by friends who had traveled to distant alpine regions.
Depending what you plant, the plants evenually fill in and in some cases cover a lot of the rock, so you don't really focus on the kind of rock used.
The rock bones of my garden and rockeries are often only visible in the spring, before the plants take over.
