DryStoneGarden

Last month on our way to a wedding in Oregon we spent several days climbing at Smith Rock. Pretty fantastic place. We’d been there once before, about five years ago. Great climbing and scenery, but even beyond that, the place is really well designed for climbers. The campground is great, with the tent area on the rim of the canyon away from the parking/cooking/bathroom area. The bathrooms are clean and there are hot showers, the approach trails are nice and well-maintained, and there’s huckleberry ice cream within walking distance of the campground. But just saying all that doesn’t really get the point across; you need to have seen other climbing areas where the climbers are treated like encroaching dirtbags (which they often are) to appreciate how nice Smith is. It’s the only climbing area that made me write fan mail to the area’s administrators, and in fact one of the other climbers was saying that he did the same thing and that the park system gets email from appreciative climbers almost every day.

The bulk of the climbing is on welded volcanic tuff, i.e. hot ash from an eruption 30 million years ago. When the welded ash cooled, it pulled apart forming the vertical cracks and columns with steep faces, perfect for climbing. A quirk of the place is that the rock is solid near the bottom but gets loose and crumbly when you climb more than one or two hundred feet up on the climbs that top out.

The most famous formation at Smith is the Monkey Face, a detached column with the look of a nefarious voodoo doll. In the photo, there’s a climber standing in the monkey’s nostril, faintly visible if you click on it.

I’m impressed to see proper retaining walls at the base of some of the climbs, made from the lava rock found on the rim of the canyon, a rock that gets sold under the trade name Black Lichen in the Bay Area. It’s the type of rock in the header photo of this blog, actually, which reminds me that I’ve always meant to switch it out for a photo with our native moss rock. Black lichen is darker and blockier than moss rock, not quite as attractive, and it’s from Oregon rather than California, so I suppose I’d better get myself a suitable moss rock photo ASAP.

We must have woken up early in the morning when I took this photo, as this area gets crowded. It’s definitely a little strange when the whole terraced cliff is full of climbers, not exactly like they are storming an Anasazi cliff dwelling, but maybe as if they are all training to storm one.

Smith Rock State Park also has an area of columnar basalt upriver from the main rock groups. The basalt is not as tall or regular as the cliff I posted about at Devil’s Postpile National Monument, but you’re allowed to climb the columns at Smith, unlike at Devil’s Postpile. I was surprised by how much columnar basalt I saw in Oregon; at one point during our trip I scrambled down the bank of the Deschutes River and realized I was scrambling over a whole slope of the high-dollar basalt that is sold for water features in the Bay Area. It made me feel better about the ones I’ve installed, to see them so widespread.

The basalt at Smith formed much more recently than the main formations at Smith. It’s pretty remarkable for such contrasting rock and climbing to be in walking distance from the main area.

I’m back from vacation; this past week I’ve been catching up on work, but I should be back to posting now. I’m a little sad I missed Bloom Day and Blog Water Action Day. I’ll be teaching a class at Heather Farms next Saturday about taking out lawns and replacing them with low-water native and mediterranean plants, would have made a good topic for a post. Earlier this year, I posted photos of the sheet mulching process; I’ll probably do another post on lawn conversion as I go through the materials for the class. We’ve done this class at Heather Farms a few times now. Here’s the description:

Learn how to trade lawn for a beautiful and sustainable landscape. Reducing or eliminating lawn areas saves water and maintenance time, while welcoming birds, beneficial insects and other wildlife into your garden. This class will discuss step-by-step, how to change a lawn area into a water wise garden without tilling or chemicals by using a technique called sheet mulching. The power point presentation and photographs will also cover basic garden design principles, site-appropriate plant ideas and plant installation.
Date: Saturday, October 23
Time: 9 a.m. – Noon
Cost: $20 GHF members/$25 non-members

I’m heading up to a wedding near Smith Rock in Oregon this week and then down to another wedding in Bishop soon after that. Those are two of the west coast’s renowned climbing areas, so I’ll be distracted from this blog for a little while. I should have some posts when I get back.

Rather more on-topic is this video. The footage is from the Stone Foundation’s January workshop and symposium. 14th and 15th generation Japanese stone masons came to California to demonstrate their traditional method of dry stone castle and wall building, and to supervise the construction of some ramparts at a park in Ventura. Most noteworthy in the technique is that the walls are battered with a subtle arch/concave shape for structural stability and that each of the structures has a ‘mirror stone,’ an especially large stone meant to reflect the strength of the builder or owner. The caption says the video is a documentary in progress, but I like it as is; it’s not fast-paced, but that’s appropriate for a stonework video, and there’s some good footage of rock shaping.

The Stone Foundation has an article about the project with info and photos. The Ventura County Reporter did a writeup with a slideshow, and the Ventura County Star put video footage in theirs. I’ve never been to any of the symposiums, but I know a few people who have, and they speak really highly of them. Looks like it was pretty cool.

Clockwise -- Rosa, Sedona Red, Buckskin, Oak, Buff, Peach

The corollary to the East Coast Connecticut Blue, is our West Coast Arizona flagstone. It’s sort of the ubiquitous, default flagstone of Bay Area gardens, but I’m always happy to use it. It’s easy to work with, and I like the color range, with each of the colors having a slightly different feel. Oak is the hardest; Buckskin and Peach are the nicest to work with; Sedona Red is the lowest quality, the one to avoid.

Arizona Peach Patio at Installation

Peach is probably my favorite, though in the Bay Area it tends to gray over time if it doesn’t get a lot of sunlight and air circulation or if you don’t put a sealer on it. I showed the photo of this patio once before, but here are a couple of more photos. The plants have really filled in around it.

Arizona Peach patio 1 year later

After Three Years

The Pacific Wax Myrtles are eight feet tall now, three years after planting as five gallons. I think they’re going to lose the race with the workers constructing the McMansion next door, but they should provide a good screen fairly soon.

Arizona Peach

Last month I went back and built a second patio with the leftover stone and another new pallet of stone. The cinder blocks are new veggie and flower beds that the clients are building. I think the block will eventually get mortared and stucco’ed.

Sedona Red

Sedona Red is by the far the softest, weakest, crumbliest of the Arizona flagstones. My parents house was the only place I’ve ever used it, and I hope to never use it again. Fortunately, the patio is mostly to be seen and is rarely walked on, so there haven’t been problems with cracking. This is a photo of it in its first year; I had some nice photos of it this spring with a ton of crocuses blooming, but those photos were lost when our laptop got stolen. If the crocuses do their thing again next spring, I’ll swap this photo out for a better one.

Sedona Red sideview

You don’t really want sandstone to be this striated; it’s often a sign of how weekly bonded the layers are. With other Arizona sandstones, the striations are not nearly as distinct.

Buff Sideview

I have a few more photos of palleted stone below, similar to what you would find at the stoneyard page, but not so tiny. Actual colors of course vary. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the other forms Connecticut Blue takes in the Bay Area is as tumbled stone for edging and very low walls. It comes in a few different widths, but the stone in this garden is 6 inches in width, which is a bit undersized for retaining walls; the stones just don’t have the mass to lock in securely. Also, the tumbling makes the stone kind of low on friction. But, that said, the stone has been in this garden a long time (since before I first saw it five years ago), and it’s really easy to re-stack any sections that shift. It’s probably one of the best stones to use if you don’t have much experience at stacking; you just try to keep the stones level and break your joints. I like it for this type of cottage garden with the plants growing around the stone, hiding it in the summer and revealing it in the winter.

In the last photo, you can sort of see from the wide joints that the stones on this section are slowly migrating down the slope. A rule of dry-stacking is to keep the stones perpendicular to gravity even on a cross-slope, like steps rather than a ramp. The more regular and rectangular the stone, the more important it is, but people don’t seem to follow that rule as much nowadays in this age of mortared stonework. It’s not a big deal with low edging that is so easy to re-stack, but it would be a problem in a larger wall. In this case, though I was spending a few hours re-stacking someone else’s stonework, I considered it more like garden maintenance than a stone repair job, and if I hadn’t been replanting the garden, the owners would have left the stone how it was. A few plant photos are below. Read the rest of this entry »