Landscaping stone

There are many kinds of stone and mineral in the world, and actually all of them can be used as landscaping stone. You can use shells from the sea to keep slugs out of your pumpkin garden, you can use granite boulders from the mountains of Utah to support bench seats in your yard, or you can use rose quartz crystals to decorate your potted plants. The variety and options for use a unlimited, if you can get your hands on the stones you want to use. That is the main problem. If you want to drop a rock the size of a car in your yard to let your kids play on it, that can be a logistic nightmare. And if you want to embed diamonds in your patio, that might cost you more than your budget allows. Otherwise, what you can imagine can be pretty much done using stone to work up a design in your landscape.

Most stone used as landscaping stone comes from rivers, quarries, or is collected or harvested from fields where it is removed to make it easier to grow crops. The rock is loaded onto trucks or rail cars and then hauled to a so called rock yard, which is a big flat space where rocks are set up and arranged by size or type, on wooden pallets. If you like a particular kind of rock you may have to buy it by the pallet, instead of piece by piece, so usually stone yards sell you stone by the pallet, and the pallets are wieghed on a scale and then you pay a per pound price, depending on how expensive the stone you chose is.

You might use native regional rock from a rock yard for your landscaping stone, and in that case you would go the yard and pick it and load it onto the truck with the help of the yard’s forklift driver. Or they might deliver it to your job site, for a cost of around $50 or more, depending on what they charge for delivery. When you take a deliver, it will just be dumped out, so make sure you know where you want it to be dropped, to make it easier for you to then move it to the location where you plan to use it to landscape.

Landscaping stone comes in various sizes of course. Many landscapers, especially those who don’t have much experience with stone, prefer to use the flat and thin stones, that appear to be like shale, and are easy to stack and carry. They can be stacked to about two feet high without much trouble of tipping, and are lightweight and easy to move in a wheel barrow. More experienced masons prefer to use rock that has at least two good faces for dry stacking, and they will choose rocks for the base and top course that are generally a little longer, heavier, and more stout.