RENEGADE GARDENER™

The lone voice of horticultural reason

Don’t place boulders in your yard as if they were just dropped from the truck.

In this photo, they probably were. In the landscape, boulders are the coolest thing ever—they fill space, add mass, color and texture, and they’re unmatched for giving context to plantings. But they need to look as natural as possible, and and that means digging a hole the width of the base of the boulder, and burying the bottom quarter to a third, so it appears as an outcropping.

The top photo shows three decent boulders, they’re glacial granite, a little bland, but OK. You have a large, a medium and a small, which is nice. But I would have placed them so the large and the medium were kissing, the medium just in front and to the side of the large, with the small separated from the two by a foot or so, trailing off.

This is an outcropping.

And then I just might have added a plant or ten.

Don Engebretson
The Renegade Gardener