Prefer Sitting in Your Garden to Working in It? It's Decorative Gravel Time!

If you prefer sitting in your garden to working in it, it's decorative stone gravel time! There's so much you can do to any garden with gravel to make your favourite outside space a place to treasure and love.

Decorative gravel need not detract from the beauty of all your flowers and plants. It need not detract from the pristine perfection of your lawn. It will, however, enhance everything in the garden to make your leisure time there even more enjoyable.

Decorative

There's something very special about decorative stone gravel. It can and should be used as a complementary feature in your garden, and not as something that competes with every plant and flower you have. This is quite easy to achieve fortunately, for gravel is a material that naturally blends into any nature setting.

Prefer Sitting in Your Garden to Working in It? It's Decorative Gravel Time!

A garden path is probably the most obvious way to use gravel in the garden. It doesn't have to be a long winding path that sweeps majestically from gate to door. It can be something much more modest and it will still have a powerful effect through adding a central focus to your garden.

The gravel in your path doesn't have to be boring either. There are a wide range of natural stone materials that can be used in a wide range of colours too. A modest path can be transformed from mediocre to magnificent by using colours and patterns. You are really only restricted by your own imagination.

If you have a large lawn area it can be a great idea to break it up into smaller areas by introducing small meandering paths across the lawn. These should be fairly narrow, probably no more than two feet wide, and they should not be straight. A winding effect works best in most circumstances, and can even be used for creating sheng fui chi, thereby expelling sha chi for a more harmonious space.

Another advantage in creating small winding paths through a large lawn is the fact that you will make the garden more maintenance-free. You will have less lawn to mow and therefore more time to sit in your garden, admiring the decorative stone gravel you have strategically placed throughout it.

The other obvious large area where you can have gravel in is a patio. Patios are great in any garden. They provide a space to relax in, or where you can set up a barbecue, or just sit and let the world go by, perhaps while enjoying a fine glass of wine on a splendid summer's evening.

Decorative stone gravel works really well in plant and flower beds. Apart from looking great, it helps to reduce moisture evaporation and soil erosion. This also means that you will have less garden maintenance work to do and more time to sit and admire the beauty of nature.

If you have a pond or some kind of water feature, decorative stone gravel really comes into its own. Stone and water go together as naturally as bread and butter and they look really good too. Some gravel scattered near the edge of a pond or by a small waterfall can really make it stand out, cutting down maintenance in the process and giving you something else that is beautiful to admire as you relax in your garden.

Prefer Sitting in Your Garden to Working in It? It's Decorative Gravel Time!

David A Robinson
Help and information about using decorative gravel for driveways and gardens. Why struggle at the DIY store when you can have gravel delivered to your door?

Looking For Low Maintenance Garden Ideas? Look No Further Than Decorative Gravel

In springtime many of us look to the garden with the idea of sprucing it up a bit in preparation for the summer. We all love to have a beautiful garden that our neighbours can admire, but sometimes we don't always want to have to put in the considerable work that it usually entails.

You don't have to!

Decorative

Looking for low maintenance garden ideas? Look no further than decorative gravel. It won't actually make your flowers grow, it won't actually pull out the weeds for you, and it certainly won't do any digging for you, but there's a lot that it can do.

Looking For Low Maintenance Garden Ideas? Look No Further Than Decorative Gravel

Gravel is the secret weapon that thousands of gardeners quietly employ. They are the ones whose gardens are always admired. They are also the ones who do the minimum of work to achieve it, and even less work to maintain it. Others scratch their heads and wonder just how they do it. Gravel, or to be more precise, decorative gravel is the simple answer.

You can obtain gravel in a dizzying array of colours and shapes. It comes from all kinds of stone, both hard and soft varieties and it has all kinds of uses in the garden too. It has the wonderful ability to look expensive without being expensive, and it retains an elegance that only real stone can.

The obvious use of decorative gravel in the garden is in a path or driveway. There's nothing quite like the satisfying crunch of gravel underfoot, or under car tyres. It has a kind of quality sound, perhaps because all the country mansions featured in films usually have gravel driveways. There's a kind of nostalgic 1920s Jeeves and Wooster feel to gravel in the garden.

Gravel has more mundane, but useful application in the garden. Spread around a plant or flower bed over the soil it has the effect of preventing soil erosion from heavy rain and wind. Gravel can help to restrict the evaporation of moisture from the soil, helping plants and flowers to grow better. It also helps to restrict weed growth.

Your low maintenance garden comes from all the things you don't have to do as a result of using gravel. It can mean less watering, less soil management and less weeding for a start. If that was all, then it certainly would be worth it, but there's a lot more you can do.

If you have a large lawn area, consider breaking it up with areas of gravel. Using different colours and textures you can create a most pleasing effect. You will lower your maintenance level by not having to mow so much lawn. Now, surely that is an attractive proposition!

A large lawn can have paths meandering through it. It creates a lazy effect that breaks up the straight lines. It can also be used in this way for the principles of Feng Shui if you are in to that, but just because it looks great and gets you out of too much lawn mowing should be reason enough. It's true: If you're looking for low maintenance garden ideas, look no further than decorative gravel.

Looking For Low Maintenance Garden Ideas? Look No Further Than Decorative Gravel

David A Robinson
Help and information about using decorative gravel for driveways and gardens.

A Low Maintenance Garden With Decorative Gravel

Creating a low maintenance garden with decorative gravel is easy to do. Gravel is available in a dizzying array of colours and sizes that can fit into almost anyone's garden plans. Gravel is quite inexpensive and easy to use. It requires a minimum of maintenance and always looks great.

Decorative gravel can be bought in colours ranging from gold to white, black to red, cream to brown, and purple to green, any shade of grey, and practically any other colour in between. You can get small gravel sizes of 8 millimetres through to large sizes of 75 millimetres. This article offers you five different ways to have a low maintenance garden with decorative gravel.

Decorative

1. Use gravel around plants and flowers. This will add visual appeal to your flower beds. You can choose decorative gravel in a colour that enhances and contrasts the colour of each group of flowers or plants.

A Low Maintenance Garden With Decorative Gravel

Gravel around flowers doesn't just look good. It will help to avoid soil erosion as well as helping to control the weeds. Gravel around plants and flowers will also help to retain the moisture in the soil, which is very useful on a hot day in summer.

2. The edges of ponds and pools can greatly benefit from decorative gravel. Don't fall into the usual trap of making it all evenly ringed around the pool or pond. That looks unnatural. Vary the area amounts in places making it a more random layering. Use different colours and sizes to vary it even more, and possibly even include pebbles or sand, as well as larger rocks and stones.

3. A waterfall area can be truly enhanced through the use of decorative gravel. It needs to be used in conjunction with natural looking rocks and stones. The gravel can be used to fill in areas between the larger items giving the whole effect a much more rounded-off appearance.

4. Perhaps the most obvious use of decorative gravel is in a main path through your garden. For a path you are probably best to choose one colour and texture and stick to it, though using patterns or mosaics is quite possible too. A path is likely to take a lot of gravel to fill. As a rough guide, expect to need around one tonne of gravel for each five metres of path that's one metre wide and 100 millimetres in depth.

5. A large area of lawn with nothing to break up the monotony is not making the best use of your garden. Lawns need regular mowing. For the best low maintenance lawn, break the area up by creating winding decorative gravel walkways through it. These needn't be too wide, just enough for someone to walk over. You can be very creative here for a most pleasing effect using different colours and patterns.

Having a low maintenance garden with decorative gravel makes sense from so many perspectives. It will look great with just a minimum of planning and thought. There isn't very much work involved in creating it. It is fairly inexpensive, and you can cut down the regular maintenance work required by half if you do it properly. That has to be worth considering.

A Low Maintenance Garden With Decorative Gravel

David A Robinson
Help and information about using gravel for driveways and gardens.