How to use decorative gravel, pebbles, and stones in your garden and flower beds: 40 amazing ideas

Decorative stone is a universal element of landscape design that harmonizes perfectly with the environment, bright colors, and various shapes, and successfully places accents. Such an element of decor is used in the arrangement of parks, gardens, personal plots, and paving paths, for the construction of pools, alpine slides, and decorative ponds.

Decorative stone for landscape design has a lot of advantages among which:

Environmental friendliness and safety
Aesthetic appearance
Wide choice and rich color scale
Good performance characteristics: strength, resistance to negative external factors, durability
Versatility and originality
With the help of decorative stone, you can realize various compositions and bring to life even the most daring design decisions.

When choosing a decorative stone, an important parameter is its size. In landscape design, classification of stone sizes is used, which we will discuss below.

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Lumps. This type is large, overall, raw stones, which are distinguished by irregularities, chips, and relief edges.
Boulders. A decorative stone of this class has a rounded shape, which was obtained as a result of processing by wind, water, and time.
cobblestones. Decorative stones of this variety are distinguished by their small size and streamlined shape.
Pebbles are small rounded stones of different colors and shades.
Crushed decorative. This species is a waste that is obtained during the extraction of various rocks and represents small pieces of different sizes (fractions).

How to use decorative gravel, pebbles and stones in your garden and flower beds: 40 amazing ideas

Screenings and sand. Today, decorative stones are an indispensable element of landscape design. With their help, you can implement various ideas. The most popular of them are:

Imitation of a dried-up stream: for this type of decoration, as a rule, pebbles, cobblestones, and boulders are used, which form the bottom of the stream, and a winding stone path is laid along;
Path: this option allows you to create a path of any shape from the stone of different sizes; the main rule is that the path should be winding – it is this condition that will give it naturalness and naturalness. A combination of different textures and shades is possible;
Stone plant – this method is perfect for decorating a garden, because the basic principle is to create a stone layer of pebbles around a tree, shrub, or other plants – such a layer not only looks spectacular but also protects the plant from drying out. When watering, water seeps through the pebbles, while the stone layer slows down the evaporation process;
Gabions – this use of stone is to create a mesh frame, which in the middle is filled with cobblestones and pebbles of different sizes;
Stone compositions with a reservoir and small artificial reservoirs with stone banks are especially popular – these can be springs, fountains, a pond, and so on.
Decorative garden stones are ideal for creating flower beds and alpine slides. They not only perform a decorative function but also a practical one – they act as a border.