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for their size, growth requirements, flowering
times, general interest and beauty, and again, are
discussed endlessly! And then finally, the day
all the preparation and scheming gets put into
action.
Most of the rock gardens I have constructed
in the past have been confined to containers,
or raised beds around trees, or larger beds built
around old dormant anthills that needed to be
adorned with succulents. To date, however, my
crowning achievement with rock gardening has
to be the behemoth succulent bed I constructed
from scratch along the side of the driveway, one
of the few places left in our garden that had
both the space and the sunshine requirements
needed for a rock garden.
The idea behind this large undertaking was to
create a dedicated and suitable area to showcase
my growing succulent collection, allowing these
plants to grow in a fashion suitable to their own
requirements in order to teach me what each
species could tolerate.

This new garden consists of a massive double
layered raised bed that is 50m long, about 7m
wide in the middle and tapers off on both ends
to follow the driveway contours. It took
approximately 2 weeks to construct the raised
bed itself with 4 people. We used 50m of
3
building sand, 20m compost, about 5m of
3
3
building rubble and 10m of rough silcrete
3
stone rocks. We also used approximately 2m
3
of Mamuno sandstone and about 100 small
concrete flagstones in the surface features such
as the walkways and underneath pots to keep the
drainage holes open.
The building rubble was added to the centre of
the raised bed outline where the rock garden was
to reach its greatest height. This rubble provides
drainage, internal support and strength to the
overall construct, as loose sand and soil tends to
compact and deflate over time.