DryStoneGarden

Last week I helped a family member prep his house for sale. I had done some stonework there a few years ago, so to prep it now we just added some sod and mulch. It’s always kind of nice to work in the tiny backyards of the Berkeley flats. I think family members should all be encouraged to have really small yards.

The flagstone here is Connecticut Blue, a sandstone which is not always from Connecticut and only sometimes looks bluish. It gets sold in a lot of different shapes and thicknesses out here, popular for creating that East Coast bluestone look. We tend to use it when we want to blend in with existing concrete and not put that concrete to shame. In this case, we wanted to make the massive former hot tub slab look like an integrated part of the yard, rather than just a massive former hot tub slab. We also wanted to make the massive wall of ivy into something other than a massive wall of ivy, but that phase never happened, a project for the future owners, I guess.

When you factor in the embedded energy and the $500/ton price tag, I’m not sure Connecticut Blue is all that much better than just using recycled concrete/urbanite for a patio, but there’s no question the stacked flagstone makes a much nicer step.

I like the Connecticut Blue in the hellstrip with the gold DG. We used blue path fines for the joints of the patio, and in retrospect it would have been better with the gold. The blue has a tendency to leave little gravelly bits on the stones, not nice for bare feet.

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All the stonework and most of the plants happened three years ago, so the main thing we did to get the yard ready was to add sod. We spend a lot more of our time taking out lawns instead of putting them in, but lawns do have their merits and sometimes you gotta just throw down some sod. I’ve been collecting photos of the seed-grown and Carex pansa lawns we’ve installed. Someday I’ll do a post on them.

Leptospermum Dark Shadows

These Leptospermum ‘Dark Shadows’ were planted as 1 gallons three years ago. Pretty fast.

And just to compare with the Connecticut Blue in path fines, a photo of recycled concrete/urbanite in path fines from a different project, the closest comparison I have.

cabernet stone wall

This cabernet stone wall (not built by me) is a good example of how a wall looks when you build using a stone grinder. It has extremely regular courses and a very clean face, and every stone is rectangular, and I know, from working with cabernet myself, that the stone didn’t come like that in the pallet. The builder used a grinder wheel to straighten the sides and remove any unevenness.

cabernet stone

Personally, I find it unpleasant to use a grinding wheel so much and I like walls to look a little more handmade. I like to have some rough faces and some irregular joints. I think the different size and shape of the stones adds visual interest; that’s why you use stone instead of brick. But that said, this is a nice looking wall; the eye slides across it, very nice and very smooth. I know this wall because a potential client pointed me to this wall and told me that this is exactly what she wanted. I’m sure she liked it better than the cabernet walls I’ve built. 

cabernet stone with grinder scars

Up close you can see the white grinder scars along the tops of the stones, from the grinder wheel sanding away the stone. Old school dry stone wallers hate grinder scars, but most people don’t notice. If you can’t see the scars in the photo, you probably wouldn’t notice them in the wall either. A few more photos are below. (more…)

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, 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…)

cabernet stone

This was the first wall I built using Cabernet stone, a slatey type of stone from back east. I think the stone for this particular wall still has the best color of all the cabernet walls I’ve built.

cabernet wall detail

I usually avoid stacking across the point of another stone like I did in this section of the wall, but it’s fun to break the rules every once in a while. The point can act as a wedge and cause the stone to crack from the weight above it, but this wall is short and that stone doesn’t have a lot of weight above it so it should be okay.

cabernet stone

Another section of the wall, with Salvia clevelandii “Allen Chickering” going crazy on the right side of the photo. I had a fun pallet of stone to work with for this job; I found a couple of nice stretcher stones (a stone that stretches onto three or more stones instead of the usual two, great for breaking a long joint or solidifying a section made of smaller stones) and an angled capstone to step the wall down naturally. Typically, where a wall steps down we also try to plant something low and bushy to soften that spot like we did with silver thyme here. Ever since this wall, I’ve been pretty much hooked on cabernet as my wall stone of choice.

ryan 11/29