DryStoneGarden

Patio with Laundry

My bloom day photo of what Daffodil Planter called ‘the vine with multi-colored blooms’ reminds me that I took a photo of it in full bloom back in May. We hang-dry our laundry for a variety of practical reasons — it doesn’t use fossil fuels (clothes driers account for 5.8% of residential energy use), line-dried clothing lasts longer, it makes sense in our climate, and, well, we don’t own a dryer — but also I sometimes like the look of it. I remember when I was in Italy I thought the laundry lines between the apartment buildings were very charming, and now looking at two shots of our patio this past spring, I prefer the one with the laundry.

Patio lacking Laundry

I know at least some garden bloggers use a line. Daffodil Planter said she has one. Townmouse has a variety of drying contraptions. It’s getting more fashionable, and there’s, of course, even a blog devoted to the topic. How fashionable is it? Seems like an opportunity to try out my slick new polling feature.

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mongrel flagstone walkway

Here’s another hellstrip walkway, from our own hellstrip in front of our house. It has a piece of Champagne in it, but otherwise is not much like the other. I’ve been adding to it for a while, building it with leftover stones from various jobs. There are seven different types of stone, though two of them, the Cabernet and the Sonora Gold, are so small they mostly just pad the total; the box for the water main should almost count as number eight. The Connecticut Lilac in the lower right was the first. It’s 3″ thick and really heavy, so I didn’t want to have to load it up to haul to another site. The most recent stones are in the upper left, Three Rivers, from a recent path installation. The only stone type I rejected was Sedona Red, a brick colored stone that looked awful; otherwise, if it was flat and the client didn’t want the leftover pieces, I stuck a few in the hellstrip. One of our ideas in starting this blog was to accumulate examples of different kinds of stone and stonework, but I’m not sure what this is an example of, other than what can happen when a stoneworker decides to make a crazy quilt. The list of stone types:

tumbled champagne with santolina

I’ve feel like I’ve mostly been posting about plants lately, not as much about stone. Spring, lots of blooms happening. Yesterday I did a checkup on a planting where we did four small stone walkways in the hellstrips. The stone is 2″ thick tumbled champagne–nice bit of branding there…It’s the champagne of stones!–set in gold path fines, aka decomposed granite. Champagne stone is a good match for the concrete of the sidewalk; it’s nicer than the concrete, but doesn’t contrast too strongly. The pattern is hopscotch; the goal is to avoid long straight lines in the joints and along the sides. We use weed cloth underneath the stone, but no bender board when we do hopscotch pattern.

tumbled champagne stone walkway

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I’m hoping this photo from last fall will sell my Mom on some gravel. She’s been resistant to the idea of using gravel in her yard, but I think she’s picturing gray construction gravel. I probably need to start calling it Tuscany Gold, the way they do at the stoneyard, make it sound more stylish. The Tuscany Gold looks a bit mediterranean/southwestern for her taste, but gravel has some advantages over flagstone, mainly that it drains well and it’s inexpensive and easy to install and maintain. It’s not so good for patio furniture, it’s not as nice to walk on, and it can get stuck in the soles of your shoes and scratch the hardwood floors, but none of those issues would be a problem for that section of my parents’ yard where they want to take out some lawn. And I think the ease of installation should trump everything in this instance. A mother shouldn’t want her only son carrying a ton of flagstone into the backyard.

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Three Rivers Flagstone

One of our clients calls Three Rivers flagstone “purple zebra,” which is a pretty accurate description. It always catches our clients’ eyes when they visit the stoneyard, though they often balk at the price, as it became really expensive a few years ago and is probably the most expensive flagstone commonly available in the Bay Area. It’s from one of the largest flagstone quarries in the United States, located up in the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. The quarry wanted to expand and the Bush administration, in their inimitable way, told them to go right ahead and not worry about doing an environmental impact study. An environmental group, the Western Watersheds Project, which owned a wildlife preserve adjacent to the quarry, then sued, and a judge agreed with the environmentalists that yes, U.S. law does require environmental impact studies, and temporarily shut down work at the quarry. Everyone settled out of court and the price then went up a couple of hundred dollars to around $750/ton.

I’ve seen the stone described as a type of quartz-sandstone and as argillite. Answers.com defines argillite as “an intermediate between shale and slate, that does not possess true slaty cleavage,” which sounds about right, except that I would add that Three Rivers is really hard and heavy. (Can I say that I prefer my stone with a bit more cleavage? It’s true. Cleavage is the tendency of stone to break cleanly.) The swirls of color in Three Rivers come from irregular mineral layers which look cool but make the stone inclined to break irregularly. The patio in the photo, for instance, has rougher, wider joints than I would do with a cleaner-breaking stone like a sandstone. To get tight joints with Three Rivers, you pretty much have to cut everything with a saw. We usually only use Three Rivers for stepping stones, paths, and small patios; it can look too busy when used for larger areas.

Quarriesandbeyond.org has links to info about the Three Rivers quarry on their list of quarries in Idaho.

Three Rivers Flagstone Patio

Arizona peach flagstone patio

Building patios is hard on the body. Too much bending, awkward lifting, and the wide spread of the stone amplifies the weight of the stone; building walls is much easier on your back. I feel like I could build walls until I’m sixty, but there must be a limited number of patios in my back. So a couple of months back I made a decision to build only 40 more flagstone patios in my life. That number is just as subjective as it sounds. (more…)