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Landscape Stone
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Featured Article:
[Posted on October 11, 2011]
Landscape Stone
In the realm of outdoor living, landscape stone offers tremendous design potential! Comprised of many types and colors of gravel, large stones, and building stones, these masonry materials can help bring hardscapes, like patios or outdoor fireplace and seating areas, together. It can also help you create unique and surprisingly fun stand-alone features in your yard, like accent rocks, retaining walls, and walkways.
Before deciding on where to use landscape stone, it is important to know what options you have. This is where a trip to a local concrete and stone store will help you. While it might seem like there cannot be much variety in rocks and stones, this assumption is far from the truth. Landscape stone gravels, for example, can be made of natural stones, like limestone. Accordingly, these come in grays and similar hues. You can also buy gravels made of chips of bricks. This type of gravel will be red, tan, white, or gray. Each type of gravel works well in different places in a yard, and talking to masonry and landscaping professionals will help you find the best material for your application.
While you are at the masonry materials store, be sure to ask them also about using landscape stone in your hardscape designs. Hardscapes refer to any outdoor living feature where you use stone and brick instead of plants and other softscape materials. Dream big while talking with professionals! Even in a small yard you can build outdoor fireplaces, water features, useful patios, and beautiful walkways. You can also fill beds around trees with landscape stone (rather than smelly fillers like mulch). Additionally, filling with stone will slow the growth of weeds.
Another way landscape stone can improve your outdoor living space is through the use of large, stand-alone features. On your trip to the masonry materials store, ask if they stock and deliver boulders or other stones. These can be placed around a yard as accent pieces, incorporated as part of larger flower and tree designs, and they also provide a unique play space for children. Imagine how much fun your children could have clambering up boulders in their own backyard! No need to take long hikes in the mountains! Forget expensive play sets! Just invite the neighbor kids over for some old-fashioned (adult supervised, of course) fun on natural landscape stones!
However you choose to use them, landscape stones can increase the beauty and fun within your backyard. So, head on down to the stone supplier near you and ask them what they have for your special projects!
[Posted on September 8, 2011]
Beautify Your Side Yard with a Landscape Stone Rock Garden
There are many uses for a masonry material like landscape stone in the front and back yards of your home. It makes lovely limestone or brick paths, which can march directly from your patio or driveway to your door or this type of stone can also create paths that meander lazily around your garden. In its smaller, chip form landscape stone can replace mulch in plant beds and as edging in walkways. It can also be used to make terraced yards in the form of stone retaining walls. These yards are especially stunning in small city residential green spaces and yards where beds of lush, hanging plants are fronted by natural looking stone which instantly raises the curb appeal of a home. Landscape stone retaining walls are also useful in sloped backyards where they can create more outdoor living space.
Another attractive option for landscape stone is to bring it into your side yard and create a type of rock garden with a few plant accents. This works especially well in smaller side yards. The first thing to do when building this type of garden is to consider the shape of the bed in the middle of it. You can choose a square, a rectangle, a circle or other shapes. Ultimately, in a small yard a rectangular centerpiece is the best choice because it is easy to shape and fill around. Once you have a shape in mind, think about how you can use landscape stone within that center feature. Edge with large stones and then plant flowers, shrubs, or even small trees within this center bed. Fill the areas around the plants with small chips of landscape stone (like small gray or blue limestone pieces or even chips of red bricks and other stones). Then, it is time to consider what you can do with the space around the center. With a rectangular centerpiece, you can build out several stone borders and paths. Using bricks, limestone, clay pavers, and other types of landscape stone will help create texture and a visually interesting space. Feel free to plant flowers and other plants through these rows of stone, but be sure to contain those plants in discrete, small beds with edging so you do not encourage weeds to sprout up throughout your rock garden. Also, if you want more of a Zen-rock garden type space, do away with the plant aspect all together and just focus on using landscape stone in different combinations and colors.
Once you have most of the side yard rock garden built, you can think about bringing in outdoor living accessories like a small bistro table and chairs, garden benches, and statues. With the right masonry materials, your side yard can be transformed from an unremarkable place to a place of beauty, tranquility, with almost no grass to mow!