Hyrax Rock and Landscaping

ch in French roughly translates to fake rock. I took it upon myself to learn this craft, and unable to spend thousands on training courses in the good old US of A, I scoured the WWW for information. Amazingly, there is precious little meaningful assistance out there and discovering this well guarded secret came down to hours of research and expensive trial and error. Rock and stone have long been valued as natural, distinctive landscaping elements. But getting the rock exactly where you want it, even in an area where real rock is readily available, is no easy feat. That's why landscape and pool designers are turning to faux rock. Not only can artificial rocks be molded, textured, and colored to exactly replicate the look and feel of real rock formations, they also can be built onsite, eliminating the inconvenience and expense of hauling. Benefits of faux rock include:

• Design flexibility
• Ease and speed of installation
• Durability
• The ability to conceal unsightly plumbing and other utilities

Starting small, we created unusual and attractive flower planters, whilst concentrating on producing realistic prototype faux rocks and rock flower-planters. Much of the basic ingredients for making “traditional” faux rock comprises hypertufa, perlite and vermiculite. There’s not a hardware shop in Victoria Falls that’s heard of these materials let alone stock them. Finding the correct materials is an incessant obstacle and I was obliged to experiment using alternatives. We have since found solutions and substitute ingredients and we now produce realistic sandstone, granite and basalt faux rock. The technique for creating a large “3 ton” rock is the same as creating a small “100kg” rock, and we can now build a rock garden you could once only dream of, with ponds and waterfalls and tropical plants. There is limited stock of planters and bird baths so orders will need approximately two weeks to cure, colour and seal before delivery.