DryStoneGarden

During the week I’m staying at a house in Richmond that doesn’t have internet or cell reception, which is probably a healthy thing overall but has been a distinct hindrance to my blogging. I still have several stone posts from Oaxaca that I want to do, but spring garden season has swallowed me up and I’m going to shift my focus to that. Stone is timeless; I can do those posts later this year when I’ll probably want to imagine myself back on vacation. In any case, it’s been a busy spring with lots of gardens looking good after all the rain and I photographed a couple of them last week.
Before I get to that, this photo shows a stone that I’ve been carrying around in my truck to weigh down tarps. I left it at a job site over the weekend and came back to find it had been appropriated into the oevre of a six year old artist during my absence. Modern in its conception, I see echoes of Basquiat, maybe a little Cy Twombly or even Jim Dine. Definitely the most charming thing to greet me at a job site in a while.

For the past year, the Clinton campaign has reminded me of Grey Davis (victorious and then recalled). It turns out she is more like John Kerry (loser). Donald Trump reminds me of George W. Bush (the worst terrorist attack in our country’s history, two failed wars, Katrina, the worst financial meltdown since the great depression), but it’s possible he will be more like Schwarzenegger (struggled to pass legislation, rode around in Humvees). Supporters and detractors of them can ignore or interpret that as they choose. Personally, I never liked any of them.

I was getting ready to start posting again and I have a couple of posts half written, but it’s going to take a little while before I am ready to move forward. Leaving my garden after ten years, moving to a cabin in the foothills felt like the end of an era; Tuesday night exacerbated that feeling. My head hasn’t quite embraced the new one.

Instead of stonework and plants and gardens, after Tuesday I feel like posting photos of cowshit. This was a cowshit election with a cowshit result. The place I’m living has two cows, Pedro and Pearl, so I have a good supply to photograph. It starts out dark and gross, but it fades to gray, and in the end it helps the grass grow green. Maybe our politics will be the same.

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“It ain’t the leavin’ that’s a-grievin’ me
But my true love who’s bound to stay behind” Bob Dylan

We’ve moved. Our garden is no longer ours. One of the underlying facts of the garden has always been that we were renters, and now our landlord has given us the boot so his daughter can live there. Which is okay. As this year’s Nobel laureate says, don’t think twice it’s alright.

We moved out a couple of months ago. The new place where we’re living is quite different from the old one, and I’ll have some blog posts about it at some point. I also might do a retrospective on the ten years at our former garden, but I’m not quite ready yet. Moving, after ten years in one place, has been a lot of work and I’m still catching up on everything. In the meantime, these are a few photos from the garden as I was doing my final walk-thru. It looks a little sad and barren — a potting area with no pots in it, a veggie garden with no veggies, perennial beds with the perennials lifted out — but maybe the new tenant will fill it with plants and it will bloom again. I had a lot of fun with it, with luck I’ll have as much fun with my next one.

I barely took photos in Bahia Asuncion, but I did take some photos at a fishing camp north of town, Campo San Roque. Fascinating landscape, even more extreme than Bahia Asuncion. There are less than a dozen houses, most of them empty, with no running water or plumbing, the plants are low leafless scrub, and the beach stretches for a couple of miles without a structure or person on it.

Tucked against the rocks is a great snorkeling site with gorgeous chartreuse-colored sea grass, lobster, and lots of colorful fish, plus the first guitarfish and octopus I’ve ever seen. It heightens the effect to be in such a barren place and then drop below the water into a lush aquarium.

Oddly enough, the town has a charmingly minimalist new church.

It reminded me of Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light. No doubt some elements of the San Roque church such as the lack of glass in the windows and the simplicity of the building come from pragmatism rather than a devotion to modernist purity, and Ando is obviously getting much more powerful effects from his design moves, but it was still an effective little building in a memorable little place.

One of my recent projects includes some containers for a roof garden. I don’t generally do a lot of containers, and it can be a struggle to find the right ones. These are from Tournesol. They make a number of products and I see their advertising in various magazines, but I wonder if this was a small project for them that didn’t have their full attention because they were a frustrating company to work with. There were long waits for estimates and other information, the turnaround time was a couple of months, and then the containers showed up without the specified drainage holes on the bottom, which was irritating because they had made us specify and draft out the holes for each container. For the price we paid, we shouldn’t have needed to drill our own holes. I’m curious if other people have had similar experiences. I like the containers and how they fit into the space without distracting from the views, but it was a lot of effort to get them and I doubt I’d use Tournesol again.

I grew up in the suburbs, so it’s always kind of amazing to me to be up on a rooftop like this. A different type of Bay Area garden space than I usually get to work in.

There is a garden somewhere inside this blog, though I haven’t posted about it much this year. It’s been a transition year for the garden. I’ve been changing around some of the plantings and I’ve upgraded some of the materials with leftover stone from the garden show and some of my installation projects. As a result, the garden has been more of a construction zone than I would like; little piles of leftover stone are probably its distinguishing characteristic. I only work on it a few hours here and there, so every project takes longer than I’d like, but I’m starting to make progress on it all.

The front path is one project that is almost completed. When we moved to this house, the front walkway was paved only with broken concrete set in dirt, so the stone is a big upgrade. Besides looking better, it’s easier to see at night and makes a much smoother and tidier walking surface, even when it needs to be swept. There are five kinds of stone in it — a large piece of bluestone at the top of the stairs, a large piece of sandstone, a slate-y wall stone, three slices of limestone from a paver that broke during the garden show, and quite a bit of basalt from the scrap pile at the stoneyard. The three hexagonal pieces are the best spot, slices from a basalt column that weren’t good enough to be sold as pricey stepping stones. I like the scuff marks from the saw.

A few of the small pieces of wallstone are place holders and will probably be swapped out at some point when larger pieces of stone come home with me. One thing I’ve learned is that, when it comes to my garden, stone happens; if I’m patient about a stone that I don’t like, an alternative will eventually come home with me to take its place.

I haven’t quite brought the path all the way to the garden gate. I’m undecided what to do in that last section. Part of me wants to do a mosaic, part of me wants to lay something less ambitious and be done. We’ll see, I’ll probably lay something temporary and if I want to change it at a future date I can.

I added a bit of edging to one of the inner garden beds. Again I’m undecided whether to continue the line along the entire bed. The flagstone path was leftover from a job I did for another designer seven years ago. It has served well enough, but I can look at it and see that it was stone I rejected from a professional installation. Upgrading the outer path made me want to redo this inner path, the kind of thinking that causes the garden to always resemble a construction site.

Another recent project is the replacement of the raised bed for the graywater from our washing machine. I built it with scrap wood and filled it with Canna and Fuchsia. It looked fine as long as you couldn’t see my terrible carpentry, but the wood eventually started to rot out, the fuchsia got crowded out by a nearby spicebush, and we got tired of the Canna. I redid the bed with basalt pieces that I used in the garden show. I love that the capstone is a single nine-foot-long piece. The new plants are all natives — Juncus patens, Yerba mansa (Anemopsis californica), Scarlet Monkey Flower (Mimulus cardinalis), and an Adiantium that I’m hoping will do well in the face of the raised bed.

Water comes from the washer and drains out from holes drilled in the pipe at intervals. The back wall of bed, out of sight tucked under the porch, is rubble that is dry-stacked with a water-proof liner on the inside of the bed to keep the water from seeping out before the roots and the soil bacteria have a chance at it.

Above is what it looked like six years ago. We’ll see how the new planting does. The plants are divisions or transplants from other parts of the garden, but things should fill in quickly, hiding the pipe and probably some of the stone; I think the scarlet monkeys will like the graywater, but they are an experiment. At the moment I like that the stone isn’t covered by plants, and I like the contrast between the polished piece of basalt and all of the saw-finished pieces. I might end up polishing them all to match; there’s something compelling about a graywater bed made with shiny, polished stone. We’ll see. Like any new project or planting, it has me looking forward to what it will look like in spring.