Landscaping With Decorative Stone

Due to the result of diminishing rainfall being experienced in recent years, Australians nationwide have come to the growing realization that there are alternatives to the vast areas of lawn traditionally found around suburban houses. And with this new trend toward smaller property sizes and less grass has come the awareness of more practical ways of surrounding their homes.

Over the past 5 years, one of the fastest growing landscape trends has become the increased use of decorative pebbles. Basically, landscapers and homeowners alike have two main sources for these pebbles and stones.

Pebbles And Stones

Imported Pebbles

Imported pebbles are an increasingly popular alternative source of decorative pebbles used in a wide variety of applications to include interior and exterior landscaping, roofscaping and even the latest trend in decorative concrete seeded exposed aggregate. They are available in a large range of colors and sizes. While they were initially found in non environmentally-friendly areas of beaches and rivers in India and Indonesia, they are now being manufactured in a wide range of natural colors in China and Italy. They are usually polished and waxed or manufactured stone that is tumbled from quarried rock to the desired size.

Polished Pebbles

Produced as a by-product to sand mining operations and found in huge stacks of up to 4 meters high and covering areas as large as a football field, polished pebbles are hand picked for their color (usually black), taken to local villages where they are polished by tumbling, then waxed and bagged.

Color Selection

Today landscape architects and designers can finish their landscape design by choosing from a wide range of over 40 different colored pebbles and over 100 different color oxides available to select from for the concrete color. The color possibilities are endless!

In addition to selecting from a variety of colors, landscape designers can incorporate exciting features such as polystyrene cut-outs set into the concrete when the initial pour is done and which can be subsequently removed and replaced with a contrasting feature concrete/pebble combination. Side borders can vary, from the many decorative bricks and pavers that are available on the market today to hand laid pebble borders using any of the 100-plus colors and sizes.

Environmentally-friendly Pebbles

One type of environmentally-friendly pebble popular in today’s market is produced by an Italian marble manufacturer who tumbles marble off-cuts to provide a colorful range of smooth edge marble pebbles which contain all the variation that are naturally found in marble and at the same time provide an especially decorative and appealing appearance to the landscape.