DryStoneGarden

tenacatita, mexico

Beach front property in Tenacatita, Mexico, south of Puerto Vallarta. I like the juxtaposition between the permanent stone foundation and the more transient tent and palapa. Tenacatita has various parties making claims on the beach front property, so no one has been willing to invest money into developing it. Some day, no doubt, a developer will line the beach with condos, but in the meantime it’s a winter home for migratory Canadians. I have a few photos of walls from the area below.

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Cabernet Stone Corner

It seems like whenever clients call us about terracing a slope on their property, the slope is actually too steep to terrace with dry stone. The slope usually turns out to be steeper than 1:1, one foot of vertical for every foot of horizontal (a quick way I estimate is to stand on the slope and measure or eyeball the distance straight out from my shoulder, my shoulder is five feet high, so if the distance to the slope is five feet then the ratio would be 1:1, ten feet would be 1:2, fifteen feet would be 1:3, and so on; if the distance to my shoulder is less than five feet the slope is too steep), and that math just doesn’t lend itself well to dry stone retaining walls, which rely on their thickness and weight to hold back the weigh of the slopes they retain. For instance, a two foot high wall needs to be a foot thick at the top, so if your wall rises two feet on a 1:1 slope, it only creates two horizontal feet and one of those feet will be taken up by the wall; your net gain is only one foot of flat planting space. It’s rarely worth the money or effort, so we usually end up building a wall at the base of the slope and then planting the rest of it with plants that thrive on slopes.

This little planting in San Francisco is the first time we’ve actually terraced a slope, though, in reality, it barely qualifies as terracing; it’s more like one wall split into two shorter walls. We could have built it as a single two and half foot high wall. But because the whole planting is at eye level on top of a thick concrete retaining wall, we didn’t want to be adding another giant wall to further loom over people. So we split the wall into two separate walls and then further softened the impact of the stone by setting the lower wall back from the concrete to create space for plants.

For the plants, we chose ones that are soft textured, drought-tolerant and mostly native to coastal California. A few of them are considered rock garden plants, a somewhat subjective term, but typically rock garden plants like sandy or gravelly soil, tolerate or enjoy reflected heat from stone, have a smaller size, and are best appreciated up close and at eye level, all elements of this planting. And then a few of the plants like the Myrica and the Phormium are standard landscaping plants for San Francisco. A photo of the whole little planting and the plantlist is below. (more…)

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 exactly as subjective as it sounds. (more…)

Sunset should have a description for Arizona flagstone: drought-tolerant, best in full sun, tolerates some shade, longer lived in well-draining soils, short-lived in zones that get hard frosts.

It’s from the Southwest, so it likes Southwestern conditions, same as the plants. The stones were all freebies leftover from a project where I was working for another designer who had ordered too much stone. To give the stone proper drainage, it’s best to lay the stone in decomposed granite and gravel, but at our house, a rental, we wanted to keep things cheap, so we laid our flagstone in dirt, and it has done okay for us. It settled more unevenly than it would in DG, several of the thinner flagstones cracked, and the stone didn’t hold its color, but the graying, mossy flagstone patio fits into the rustic aesthetic of our yard so we’re happy enough. Arizona flagstone tolerates shade and clay soil, it just doesn’t thrive in it.

We planted a few different groundcovers in the joints of our patio. The baby’s tears is looking the best these days, during the winter rains. It used to dry out during the summer, but this year we had some pots near it, so it got the water that drained out the bottom of the pots and managed to stay green all year. It’s probably our favorite groundcover for damp, mossy areas.

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Arizona Flagstone Patio

Here’s a photo of the patio in May. The baby’s tears is in the back behind the heuchera flowers.

Rock of Ages #1 by Edward Burtynsky

I got excited during the opening of the new James Bond. During the big car chase, a character said, “They’re heading for the quarry!” I’m into quarries and figured something really good was going to happen. After all, the best scene in the last Bond was the chase through the construction site. But Bond-in-the-quarry was a little disappointing: no great stone moments, no Indiana Jones boulders, nothing particularly quarry-specific. Bond drives really fast, dodges a lot machine gun fire, then shoots the driver of the other car and wins. Note to villains: machine guns don’t work against Bond. 

I occasionally come across links to webpages about former quarries. I’m going to try to keep some of them bookmarked here. We’ll see how many I add over time.

Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries in Carrara, 1911, John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent did a number of works at the quarry in Carrara. My favorite is above, a rare instance where I like an oil better than the watercolors. Others from his Carrara paintings and drawings can be seen here.

Canaletto’s The Stonemason’s Yard

I also like a quarry watercolor by Stewart White.

Other paintings include Old Quarry, Rockport by Henry Aiken Vincent, Quarry of the Chaise-Mre at Fountainbleau by Corot, The Sand Quarry by Guillaumin, Chou Quarry by Gauguin, a series at Bibemus Quarry by Cezanne, Bibemus Quarry was also painted by Andrea Masson. I can’t find Childe Hassam’s series at Rockport Quarry online, and I don’t particularly like The Quarry Pool, Folly Cove, Cape Ann.

The best quarry photographs, including ones from Carrara, are by Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky’s website has a great gallery of quarry photos.

The best quarry scenes in film are the ones in Breaking Away. Garden State has a quarry scene too. I have mixed feelings about it.

Quarries and Beyond has the most info.

Quest has a writeup on some of the old quarries in the Bay Area.

Parc des Buttes Chaumont is probably the most famous park made from a former quarry.

Opus 40 by sculptor Harvey Fite, a quarry site turned into a massive dry stone sculpture. It’s currently falling down because he didn’t break his joints, but there are efforts to preserve it.

Robert Morris made an amphitheatre/scultpure from a gravel pit, Untitled (reclamation of Johnson Gravel Pit). Robert Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill is in a former sand quarry in the Netherlands. IHilary Anne Frost -Kumpf has a webpage about reclamation projects which includes info on the Morris and Smithson pieces, Opus 40, and a Michael Heizer piece Effigy Tumuli.

Quarry Garden in Shanghai Botanical Garden, a former quarry turned into a park, won an ASLA award in 2012.

Reordering Old Quarry, a residential landscape on a former quarry, by Reed Hildebrand also won an ASLA award in 2012.

Stone Quarry Hill Art Park

An article about the San Rafael Rock Quarry in Marin Magazine

A video about the Quarryman, a rock climb at a stone quarry, has some historic footage of quarrying.

A visit to the marble quarries near Pietrasanta, a collection of photos from that area by the Atlantic, and an article in Stoneworld about Henraux quarry

Bernhard Lang aerial photos of Carrara

Rapolano, Italy

The Cactus Garden in a former quarry at Guatiza in the Canary Islands

Carrieres de Lumieres in Provence

Former quarry in Italy