DryStoneGarden

Last week I helped a family member prep his house for sale (update 8/10 — it’s now sold). I had done some stonework there a few years ago, so to prep it now we just added some sod and mulch. The house is in Albany with one of those tiny East Bay backyards, really easy to work in; 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 path fines. 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.

All of the stone is leftover from a much larger job; instead of throwing it away or selling it on Craigslist, I used it here. Some of the stone in the raised bed was too thin to dry-stack, so I mortared it with a hidden joint so it would look dry-stacked but still be solid. Other parts of the wall, using the larger stones, are actually dry-stacked, but no one can tell the difference.

Leptospermum Dark Shadows

All the stonework and most of the plants went in three years ago, so the main thing we did to get the yard ready was to add sod. I spend a lot more of my time taking out lawns instead of putting them in, but lawns do have their merits and sometimes you gotta just throw down some sod. The 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.

Moss Rock

I was recently back at a garden where I did a day of rock work last summer, a short section of moss rock wall along a sloping path. When I built the wall, the client and I incorporated a couple of cracked pots into the wall where it tapers into the slope, and then she transplanted a number of her succulents to plant along the wall and in the pots. It’s one of our only gardens in which the client is also a gardener, and it was nice to now see how her planting has begun to fill in. The plants in the cracked pots still need a little more time to spread, but I think they already look pretty cool.

Moss Rock with Cracked Pots

The wall in the background was already there, built by the company who installed the garden five years ago. I like the choice of aloes to plant along the top of it; they do well there, and their pokiness discourages people from messing with the rocks.

One of her containers

The garden is quite spectacular and worthy of a longer post some day. There are always things blooming and I usually take a few photos while I’m there; the shots of the swallowtail and prostanthera in my last post are from this garden. When the prostanthera is done, this member of the aster family will be in full bloom. I’m not sure what it is, but I like the look of the flower buds, and when it gets going, it puts on quite a show. Does anyone know it? I would try to figure it out, but the aster family is mighty big.

Some kind of Aster

The Aster with Coleonema last May or June

The Hot Springs

I bet no one thought DryStoneGarden would post about pedicures.

But I did get a pedicure of sorts at the hot springs in the Sierra de la Laguna national park near Santiago, a town about 50 miles north of San Jose del Cabo. The hot springs is very low-key, just a circle of rocks in a stream coming out of the hills. Hot water comes up through the sand and seeps out of the cliff in a couple of places, right before an abandoned concrete dam. The pool is not especially hot, though I would still rate it as a hot springs rather than just a warm springs, especially after we dug down into the sand to make the water warmer. But the unique part was that after we’d been in the water a little while, twenty or thirty small fish about 4-6 inches long gathered round and started nibbling at our feet.

It was a bit unnerving at first. Not so much the feeling — which is delicate and sandpapery, a little like being licked by a cat or I suppose a swarm of cats — but rather the thought that these fish were feeding off our bodies. But we got used to it. We joked that it was probably a fancy skin treatment in Asia, but of course it turns out that it is. And it definitely works; afterwards our skin was silky smooth. As a test, we let them feed on one of my knees but not the other, and we could indeed see a noticeable difference afterwards. It wasn’t a huge difference — nobody stared or pointed at my knees when I walked around in shorts — but one knee was distinctly shiny and smooth while the other was rough. I recommend it.

Sierra de la Laguna Granite

Veins

We explored up the gorge a ways; fun boulder-hopping. There was a double band of dark rock running along the creek for something like kilometer before the creek turned. Really beautiful. I hadn’t expected to see such striking granite in southern Baja. I was struck by the similarity between the roots of the wild figs and the veins in the rock. We basically went to the park because we happened to be passing by, but, out of all of Baja, the park is probably the place that we most want to go back to.

Wild Fig

More Veins

The Gorge,

Misión de Nuestra Señora de Loreto Conchó

Loreto has the most historic of the missions The mission, inscribed with the cool title of “Cabeza y Madre de todas las Misiones de la Alta y Baja California,” was the original headquarters for the Jesuit settlement of the Californias, and the starting point of the Camino Real, aka the California Mission Trail. Pretty much all of the early expeditions to the Californias passed through there.

Map from: California from the Conquistadores to the Legends of Laguna

The mission was founded in 1697 and the stone building was built in 1740, but it has been modified, damaged, repaired, and renovated various times.

18th Century Drawing of the Mission, public domain

Mission Loreto in 1957

source

Mission Loreto 2010

There’s an eclectic mix of stone on the mission. The front facade is quarried limestone, but I counted five different kinds of stone on the entire building, plus some bricks added during some repair jobs. The mix of bricks and stone is something I’ve seen on the mainland of Mexico, and, for large buildings, the effect is much nicer than I would have expected.

Basalt, Limestone, and Brick

More photos of the mission are below.

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Misión Santa Rosalía de Mulegé

Misión Santa Rosalía de Mulegé was our favorite of the missions. The mission was founded in 1706; the building was completed in 1766. It’s set on a hill outside the main town of Mulegé, and it has more of a desert-outpost feel than the others we visited. Various photos are below. (more…)

Misión San Ignacio Kadakaamán

Mission San Ignacio de Kadakaaman was founded by the Jesuits, but the actual church was built by the Dominicans (completed in 1786), and it’s quite different from the other missions as a result. The door is more moorish in style than the other mission doors, and none of the other missions have big crests flanking the doors. Close ups of the crests and a few other photos are below. (more…)