This is the story of how one couple decided that they wanted to create a low maintenance garden that would also save water. The largest consumer of water was the lawn and so this had to be removed and replaced with a dry creek bed. The second phase of this makeover was the creation of a rock garden in the corner of the property. This is described in an article which I found on the Birdz of a Feather blog.

Building a rock garden continues with our goal to reduce maintenance and increase sustainability in our yard: the plantings are all drought tolerant and don?t require added watering to keep them thriving. A rock garden is a great way to put water conserving into practice!

Once we had the dry creek bed in place, the corner of our garden where the fences intersect needed some interest. I didn?t want to fill in that corner with cedar or evergreens as I?m not too fond of them. Instead, we built a rock garden to complement the back corner of our tiny back yard.
To get a sense of the area we had to work with, here?s an overhead shot of the corner of the yard where we built our rock garden.

To start construction, we first built backer boards to be placed against the fencing to contain the soil to the height we wanted to raise rock garden.? Hubs decided to build it in one piece in the garage and then move it into the backyard as one unit.? He used galvanized metal strapping and corner braces to hold it all together (in addition to glue).

Hubs buried the backer board below the fence line and drove some wooden stakes in front of it to keep it secure, making sure it was level.? He didn?t screw it into the fence itself because it backed onto two of our neighbours? backyards and it needed to be independent in case they ever decided to repair or replace any of the fencing.

We dry stacked boulders in a semi-circular pattern spanning from one corner of the backer board to the other.

See more at Birdz of a Feather