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Xeric Garden Style

Defining your xeric garden style will depend greatly on your own personal style, and on the style of your house or other buildings on your property. Slavishly copying someone else's xeric garden style is not necessarily right for you, but you can take ideas from garden styles of other countries, xeric or otherwise. Form a foundation around that central idea and leave out the parts that don't appeal to you.

A mish mash of styles will not make a nice garden; there still needs to be coherence and cohesion. Various areas of your garden can have different styles as long as there is enough space between them, or some feature that will give some consistency to your style.

If you want to accent your xeric garden with a pond, a Japanese bridge, and a dry creek bed, these can all be tied together with a certain theme. This will give the design of your xeric garden style consistency.

Japanese bridge over dry creek bed

The key to my xeric garden style is the use of rock to build retaining walls and as accent pieces among all the components to unify all the areas. The crucial aspect of the cohesiveness is not necessarily the rocks themselves, as they are all different, but the use of groundcovers and mosses to tie the look together and soften and blur the outlines.

dry stream bed

Making a dry stream bed is a fun way of introducing the concept of running water into your garden, without any water at all. You'll never hear the gush and gurgle of a mountain stream, but your imagination can easily fill it in the blanks. The illusion of the burbling brook is real, even before any planting is done.

Japanese bridge

The xeric garden style that I chose, or should I say that chose me, is not Japanese as such, but is derived from many styles. I love the look of rocks, and keep an eye out for interesting specimens that can be used to make unique focal points either alone or in a group.

Japanese lantern

Pinning down your xeric garden style can be as simple as recognizing the universal attraction to water and adding a unique and interesting pond or waterfall to your plan.

water feature

And, of course, every xeric garden should include at least one pond, preferably one that is attractive to wildlife and birds.

pond in a xeric garden in summer

Visualization Techniques.

Whatever path the inspiration takes, using your instincts can help you to pin down the xeric garden style that most appeals to you. Using a technique I like to call 'cogitating' or visualizing is most useful. Cogitating consists of staying still in a comfortable place and letting the landscape speak to you. It's not mysterious, it's just your inner animal having it's say. Listen to it, as it's quite often right.

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