One of the many ways in which landscaping can enhance your garden is with the use of decorative stones. The fact that it is almost a certainty that each stone within your landscape design will be unique compared to any other garden is undoubtedly due to stones having an infinite number of shapes, textures, and colours and, thus, no two stones being 100% identical.

This provides an almost unlimited landscaping canvas for you or your landscape designer to use stones within your garden to maximum effect both in terms of their functionality and more especially, their aesthetics. Whilst stones can undoubtedly have several practical uses in a landscaped garden, such as walkways, driveways, and patios, their aesthetic attributes mean they are regarded by many as essential to a landscape design with visual appeal.

We mentioned the infinite number of appearances that stones can have. However, landscapers have created several common ways to collectively be used to great effect. Read on, and you will see that we have highlighted five of the most popular landscape design ideas for these decorative stones.

Garden Edging

One of the best ways to enhance the appearance of your landscaped garden is to ensure that the edging around it is neat and attractive. That can be achieved using decorative stones.

You can choose stone textures and colours to augment and complement the rest of the garden’s features and foliage, plus using different-sized stones for specific sections of the edging also adds to the aesthetic appeal. River and sandstone are two of the most popular decorative stones for garden edging.

Walkways

Whilst it is perfectly feasible and acceptable to use standard concrete paving within landscape designs, decorative stones take the visual appeal of your walkways and pathways to another level.

There are so many ways you can use decorative stone within walkways that extend to making the stone path one that winds around your garden, especially if the garden is large. Enhanced options include rounded pebbles, crushed white gravel, and larger decorative stones.

Firepit

You might live in a relatively warm area for most of the year. However, we are sure there are still several days and nights during winter when the temperature drops to a level where sitting in your garden can only be done if you wear several layers of clothing.

You can counter this within your landscape design by adding a firepit constructed from decorative stones. Again, you have choices ranging from rustic traditional stones to more contemporary smooth stones, which are coloured white or black.

Dry Creek Bed

Many gardens suffer from poor drainage, which can often leave them akin to a muddy field if there has been a prolonged period of rainfall. Thankfully, there are solutions, and you might consider using decorative stones to form a dry creek bed. This has a practical use as a dry creek bed helps drain water from your garden while offering a great-looking feature within your garden, especially if you use river stones.

Stone Mulch

Most gardeners will be familiar with the term ‘mulch’, but not so many are aware that stone mulch is highly effective in plant beds and provides additional benefits that normal mulch does not. The first benefit is that, given the stone mulch is mainly created with pebbles, the maintenance of it is minimal. Second, it is highly cost-effective because, unlike normal or bark-based mulch, it will not need to be replaced in 12 to 18 months.