A wall not only fulfills various purposes in the rock garden: it serves to enclose the property, as a privacy screen, as a facade cladding or is used to divide up the room. In addition, walls are also used as a supporting element, for example, for embankments and as protective bank boundaries for ponds or streams.
You can also plant on the stone wall
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 arranged with mortar or similar, but instead stabilized with earth and chippings (€46.95). Dry stone walls are usually at a slight angle - ideally at an angle of 10 to 15 percent - and support an embankment or slope. In this case, they do not need a deep foundation, because higher dry stone walls in particular stand on a substructure made of crushed stone and / or chippings. Dry stone walls can be planted and offer a valuable habitat for both rock garden plants and many endangered animals such as lizards, common toads, mason bees, stone 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 rebuilt, as well as subsequently corrected and repaired.
Various dry stone walls for every need
Unlike rigid concrete walls, dry stone walls are "movable" and can accommodate minor slope movements without damage. Due to their unsealed construction, pressurized slope water is simply drained off via the joints and the dreaded waterlogging behind the walls does not occur. Aside from slope fortifications, dry stone walls are also used for
- Construction of room boundaries in sunken gardens
- for seat walls
- herb spirals
- seawalls
- on steep pond slopes
- for building raised beds
- and much more
built.
Build dry wall yourself: That's how it's done
You can also make a low dry stone wall yourself. Sometimes, for example, garden centers or larger nurseries also offer workshops where practice walls are set up under professional guidance. However, inexperienced wall builders should rather outsource larger projects to gardening and landscaping companies. However, here's how to build a simple, low dry wall to support a slope:
- First of all you need stones and filling material.
- Depending on the type of stone, you will need around 1 tonne of dry stone 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 metres.
- Use crushed stone, chippings and topsoil as the foundation and backfill.
- The individual stones are "pointed" together with rock garden soil and chippings.
- You can put the plants in there while building the wall.
- Planting later becomes more difficult.
- 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.
- Cap stones complete the masonry at the top.
tips
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.