DryStoneGarden

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

hacienda de oro restaurant

We visited the Puerto Vallarta Botanical Garden. The garden was founded in 2004, and we were curious to see such a new botanical garden. One of the challenges of landscaping is making the planting interesting while you wait for the plants to grow, so it was interesting to see what they did with a new botanical garden. Their stated mission is to promote sustainability, protect native rainforest species and to develop the largest collection of Mexican orchids in the world. They already have a good section of native bush and an interesting shade house and conservatory, but for now, while they develop their orchid collection and wait for their revegetation plantings to fill in, the best parts of the garden are the swimming hole and the Hacienda de Oro restaurant.
I don’t mean that in a negative way; the swimming hole and the restaurant are great, and it was the most pleasant meal we ate in Mexico. The tortillas and vanilla ice cream are made there on site, our table was up on a balcony with a great view and a fresh breeze, and the service was endearingly slow and over-solicitous. We found a lot of details throughout the garden to interest us; photos are below.
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