Cover Plain Garden Walls With A Beautiful Trailing Ground Cover

While garden walls are highly functional because they provide privacy, hold back slopes, and divide your yard into different zones, a plain wall might not be all that attractive. Even though there are plenty of ways that you can make stone retaining walls that look amazing in your yard, you can dress them up even further by covering them with a beautiful trailing ground cover. Rock soapwort (Saponaria ocymoides) will not only soften the overall aesthetic of the wall, but it will delight you with masses of small pink or purple flowers from spring right through summer.

This pretty herbaceous perennial will grow happily in USDA zones 2 through 9, and each plant can cover a width of up to 2 feet. It's absolutely perfect for planting along the top of your plain garden wall, from where it will gracefully cascade down over the edge. Thanks to its spreading growth habit and dense branches, it will continue to spread out and tumble down the face of the wall. Rock soapwort has gray-green teardrop-shaped leaves and dainty five-petaled flowers at the ends of the stems. These fetching blooms can easily last for up to three weeks. Even more advantageous is the fact that this species is both drought tolerant and deer resistant, making maintenance fuss free. Don't confuse this plant with a common, beautiful ground cover that can cause chaos in your yard, known as moneywort. Although rock soapwort can self-seed in the garden, it's not regarded as aggressive. 

You'll be happy to know that this little sun-loving beauty is low care and can tolerate a range of different soils, even those that are fairly poor, as long as they're well-drained. You can grow this species from seeds that you sow in spring. It can also be propagated from cuttings taken in the middle of summer or divided in early spring. This is handy to know if you decide to purchase a couple of plants at your local nursery but want to add a few more to other areas of your yard. The only maintenance you have to do is to cut the plants back quite hard after they've bloomed, as this will encourage more growth, and you might even end up with a second flush of flowers in late summer.

Apart from the true species, there are a few rock soapwort cultivars you may like to try. For example, 'Alba' and 'Snow Tip' have stunning white blooms, while 'Rubra Compacta' sports vivid red flowers but has a much more compact growth habit — this makes it ideal for planting in gaps in a plain rock wall. Finally, if your house or shed have a wall that's just a bit bland, you can easily turn it into a place to hang and grow plants.