Alpine slide – everyone’s favorite element of garden design. A beautiful alpine slide can decorate any area. But in order to create this work of landscape art with your own hands, you need to choose the right plants. Alpine slide does not have to contain only those plants that grow in the Alps. True, you should not plant your favorite garden flowers there. An alpine hill differs from a flower bed not only in the presence of stones. The world of decorative leafy plants of various shapes and sizes reigns here. Rare flower spots alternately appear in different places, each time subtly changing the appearance of the rock garden.
Alpine slide
When making an alpine slide, it is important to understand that plants can grow quite quickly. It is necessary to leave enough space between them, because stones are also an important element of decor, they should not be absorbed by overgrown greenery. For this reason, it is not advisable to use plants with high growth energy in rock gardens, such as some species of tenacious and lucid.
Plants are mainly selected drought-resistant, do not require rich soil, frost-resistant. After all, rock gardens are usually located on a hill, moisture is poorly retained here and too tender plant roots can suffer.
Alpine slide
An indispensable attribute of any rock garden – coniferous plants. For a small alpine slide, you can use dwarf varieties of pines, spruces, junipers, thuja. For an extensive rock garden, large, tall forms are also suitable. The main thing is to harmoniously combine plants with different crown shapes – creeping, columnar, sprawling, as well as different colors of needles – green, yellow, gray, variegated. You should not place them evenly, it is better to create several contrasting groups that combine similar plants.
Ornamental shrubs also look good on the hill – cinquefoil, weigela, action will delight you with bright flowering. Barberry, sucker, dwarf willow species, cotoneaster horizontal, spindle tree – foliage color and crown shape. Even for the most tiny alpine hill, you can choose tiny willows and barberry, not exceeding 30 cm in height.
Alpine hill
Bright spring decoration of the mountaineering will provide rhododendron. His evergreen variety will bring diversity to the hill in the offseason, when only conifers remain decorating the garden.
From large decorative-deciduous plants, hosts and geichera, Badan, Chistets, Edelweiss can be advised. Filling places between the main plantings will be helped by ground cover plants – stone, cleaning, arabis, outpatient, thyme, cloves, barvino.
Add a few flower spots with dwarf bells, bitterness, geraniums, tiny aquilegia and astilb.
Alpine hill
The finished composition will give your creation cereals. Their sharp thin leaves will serve as a good contrasting background of flowering plants. For small mountaineering, plants forming a bump – oatmeal, Sesleria are suitable. If you have more space – plant a reed, lightning, soddy pike. Do not plant rhizomatous grasses that grow easily. It is especially unpleasant that they can spread under stones, and it will be problematic to remove them.
To give your rock garden an elegant look in spring, generously use bulbous – dwarf varieties of tulips, crocuses, muscari, galanthus, scylla. Colchicum will decorate your rock garden in late autumn, when other plants have faded.
With the right choice of plants, your alpine slide will delight you for a very long time, while requiring minimal maintenance.