CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Many serious gardeners joke that they spend the first 10 years getting the rocks out of their gardens and then the next 10 years adding rocks back into the landscape.

Dick Meyers is just that gardener. Meyers and his wife, Pat, live in a secluded dell off Corridor G in Charleston. There are thick woods behind the house and a ravine in the front. Between those two natural elements, Dick has carved out a slice of manicured beauty complete with a pond, waterfall, covered patio and lots of garden statuary.

The problems arose when the natural elements, aka the deer herd, started encroaching on the carefully tended areas.

"They ate everything -- the shrubs, evergreens. They ate it all on this part of the hillside," Dick said, pointing to a steep slope off the driveway area of the property.

So Dick set out to create a rock garden that defies the slope and the critters that live there. He concentrated on the structure, not the plants, to deter the roaming herd.

"Deer have a hard time on the rocks," Dick said. "They will slide and fall when they try to walk on these rocks."

He's created little pockets of soil between rocks of all shapes, sizes and colors. "I place the rocks, and then I move them around. It's trial and error," Dick said.

Each rock has a story, and many of them were gifts. There's a petrified log from an old friend and a piece of quartz from Canada that came from his father's fishing camp. A chunk of limestone that came from Virginia Tech, where Dick's brother teaches, is near a hunk of glass sitting atop another stone, a remnant from the former Libbey-Owens-Ford glass plant in Kanawha City.

In another area, there's a row of rocks taken from a project that Dick worked on before his retirement as an architect.

"Those stones came from the South Central Regional Jail site," said Pat. "We call it our jailhouse rock."

Pat said a trip to Jerusalem was an inspiration for the garden. Flowers are scarce, so, instead, visitors to the aboveground tombs place stones atop the monuments as memorials.

The stones symbolize tears, Pat explained.

Plants in the rock garden have come from a variety of sources, but Dick said many come from Green's Feed and Seed, where he's found the best selection. A beautiful shrub sits at the top of the hill, from the garden of Dick's daughter, Sandy, who teaches chemistry at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.

"I'm not sure what it is, and we didn't think it would make it with the different climates, but it's beautiful and thriving," Dick said.

There are sedums, woolly thyme, candytuft and creeping jenny and many other low-growing, sun-loving species.

The Meyerses love water features, and they have a trick to make the fountains look cool and inviting.

"Add this to the water," Pat said, holding a container of copper sulfate. "It turns the water a pretty shade of blue." She cautioned that the additive stains concrete, pointing to one of the fountains in the Meyerses' garden that's a beautiful shade of bluish-green.

Jeff Cox, in Horticulture Magazine, gives the following advice for creating a rock garden:

"You can haul rocks from the wild, so to speak, if you have the property owner's permission. Or you can buy interesting rocks at a landscape supply yard. [Protect] your back. Make sure you wear a tight-fitting brace that supports the lower back and abdominal muscles. Many landscape equipment rental places will have them."

Cox emphasizes a natural look for adding rocks to the garden, insisting that rocks be of the same kind and color, like they are found in nature. He recommends using one large, dominant rock with several smaller ones, and partially burying the rocks, as they would appear in one of nature's outcroppings.

Suggested plants that show off rocks include: low-growing plants like alyssum, bleeding hearts (Dicentra), catmints (Nepeta), stonecrop (Sedum) and hens and chicks (Sempervivum), Corsican mint, lungworts (Pulmonaria).

If you plant shrubs behind the group of rocks, use dark green evergreens like false cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa'Nana Gracilis') and interesting deciduous shrubs like Harry Lauder's walking stick (Corylus avellana'Contorta'), or the colorful redtwig dogwood (Cornus stolonifera).

Reach Sara Busse at sara.bu...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1249.