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This was a tough debate to weigh in on. I love working with all kinds of stone in my garden. But let's get one thing straight right away. There is no place in a carefully crafted garden for cheap manufactured stone blocks like the ones you find at giant home improvement stores. The only advantage of these stones is that they are cheap and readily available. Things that are cheap and readily available are rarely beautiful.

Back to the debate, I come down on the side of natural stone. I think this is because I cut my teeth as a landscaper while living in New Orleans. While this sub-tropical city is great for growing, you can't find natural stone anywhere! The entire region is built on the accumulation of millions of years of Mississippi River mud and silt so a stone as as hard to find as a snowball. I learned to appreciate and long for rocks of any kind. I imported rocks from my dad's house. Volcanic rocks he brought back from somewhere (Hawaii?) and river sculpted round stones from upstate New York.

Now I live in Connecticut and have a cousin in Pennsylvania with a little bit of land. He has tons of natural flagstone that comes right out of the earth in perfect, one-inch sheets. I've used them to make a patio and he has built stairs and walls that really enhance the look and value of his property. All this at no cost for the material. And the beauty is incomparable to manufactured stone.

Many of my garden borders are made of rocks found in the ground in my yard or my neighbors yards. These borders make it tough to trim the grass that grows between them, but they add a lot of visual interest to the garden. They are easy to manipulate and each one is has a character of it's own. And again, they were free!

I do have one weakness for man-made stone, if they really fit this category. Bricks! Especially old bricks with rounded edges and stamps that name the manufacturer or city of origin. I've done brick walkways with as much character as old cobble stone streets. My grandfather used bricks as borders in his gardens. As a child these borders were highways for wheelbarrow rides!

No matter what kind of stone you use, I think landscaping is all about the mixture and interplay of hard and soft. The vibrant but tender life of your plants contrasting with the stoic and steady durability of rock and stone. One thing I've found moving from New Orleans to Connecticut is that during the winter the only interesting thing in your garden will be the stone, so take the same care choosing it as you do your plants.

Learn more about this author, Nathan Munro.
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