DryStoneGarden

The Stone Foundation just began an online version of their print magazine, StoneNexus. They’re calling the web magazine STONEZINE. Future issues will be for Stone Foundation members, but the first issue is available for free. Anyone interested in stone should definitely click over to check it out and also consider becoming a member. The print magazine always has lots of good content, ranging from historic stonework to recent projects, and the online form seems to have even more.

Last December I posted about edging three of our four veggie beds with stone. This past week I did the final veggie bed, so all of the garden beds are now fully edged with stone. That feels like an important step, considering the name of this blog and the fact that our veggie garden is more prominent than in most gardens. There are seven kinds of stone throughout the four beds, plus a couple of more in other parts of the garden, all of it leftover scrap from larger projects.
I’m pleased to have the stonework done, but I’m also really pleased just to have once again used up all of my leftover materials. Yesterday one of our neighbors asked which house was mine, and I was getting a blank look from my initial descriptions, but when I said ‘the one that always has stone piled in the hell strip,’ she immediately knew which house I meant. Not really a good thing. There’s not currently any stone piled there, which feels like an accomplishment, but I’m also now out of spots in the garden that need stonework, so I’m not sure what I’ll do the next time I have leftover materials.

Out of all the sections, my favorite is this mix of tan and gray sandstones, probably because it is so different from what I usually build; I usually don’t mix different kinds of stone and I usually don’t like to see saw cut edges. Novelty has a distinct charm. I’ve had a big list of projects to do in the garden this year (including the garden-shed/blogging-room still waiting for me to finish the stucco) so Anita has taken over vegetable gardening duties. Last year, I started to fill the beds with permanent plants like blueberries, currants, and strawberries, but she’s opening them back up for annual vegetables. This is our first time growing lettuce in two years.

Along with taking over the veggies, Anita tidied up our front porch this week, another long overdue task that included rearranging the containers beside our front door. We’ve had a Brugmansia there for a couple of years, but it was getting tired after years living in a container in deep shade. This Vine Maple is now in its place. It’s a little one that needs a pedestal to raise it up high enough for the space, but it’s a really nice specimen. I think it was the last plant in our garden to leaf out this year, but the foliage is totally worth the wait.

And speaking of containers, one random thing I did with some of the smaller scrap was make this little container. I thought I might use it in the veggie garden edging as a cornerstone or something, but that turned out to be a silly idea; it’s much better as a stand alone little thing. It currently has Scotch Moss in it, but I’m trying to think of a native groundcover that might work. There’s a Mimulus groundcover, M. primuloides, that would look good, but I think it would need constant water and I’m not sure how it would do with the alkaline interior of the container. The native Sedum would probably work, but I don’t think it would contrast enough with the gray stone. Any suggestions about other small native groundcovers?

I almost included this in my post about the Richard Serra sculpture at the Stanford museum, but it seemed like it should get its own post. It’s Stone River, one of several Andy Goldsworthy pieces in the Bay Area. The others are Drawn Stone at the De Young museum and Spire in the Presidio. This one is my favorite of the three. I love the snakelike form and the stylized coping stones. Vertical coping stones along the top of a wall are common, especially in Europe, but I’ve never seen them quite like this. It’s all built from rubble the university saved after the earthquakes of 1989 and 1906, 128 tons of stone, 320 feet long.

The whole thing is set into the ground with the top of the wall at grade. Because the color of the stone and the dirt match so closely, it sort of feels like someone took a big scoop of dirt and compressed it into the stone for the wall. I like to see how far I can get walking along the top (not very far).

This little jetty sticking out into the mudflat (click on all of these to see them bigger) is a memorial to one half of the Bay Area’s largest and most ambitious drystone construction, the Oakland Harbor Training Walls. It’s in Oakland’s Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, which is a rather incongruous park. The park is out in the middle of the port surrounded by industrial activity, there’s a ton of lawn which no one ever uses and in fact the geese have turned rather unusable, and there are a bunch of big landscape elements that reference the history of the port: the shade structure in the photo below, a concrete path that marks the footprint of a giant 19,000 square foot building that they took down, and the rock jetty that commemorates the port’s north training wall.

The harbor’s north and south training walls were two long jetties designed to ‘train’ the tide. Unlike a typical riprap jetty made of haphazardly dumped piles of rock designed to absorb wave or tidal energy, each rock in the training wall was fitted by stoneworkers to give the wall a smooth face that would accelerate the water instead of slowing it down. Back in the 1800’s, Oakland’s harbor was shallow and it tended to fill with silt; ships could only enter it during high tide. The idea of the training walls was to channel the tide’s energy so that when the tide went out it would also suck all the silt out with it, reducing the need for dredging. The walls were started in 1874 and took twenty years to build, with some impressive stats: 310,000 tons of stone, 500,000 square feet of wall, 20 feet wide at the base, 8 feet wide at the top, 6 feet above the low water point. The north wall was 9500 feet long, the south wall 12,000. Apparently the walls worked; the signage says the port’s activity went up 2000% after they were built.

The south wall is still there, but the port the north wall out in 2001 when they widened the channel so bigger container ships could use it; as part of the approval process, they used some of the north wall’s rock to build this memorial. I didn’t do all that good with my photos of it (there’s a better one at Oakland Geology) and I might try again some time when the tide is in or I might try to find a good view of the south wall. Honestly, though, I think the appeal is more intellectual than aesthetic.

It looks a little better with some sun flare drama. You can see the contrast between the training wall’s fitted stone (above) and the riprap’s rough faces (below).

Overall, though I said it was incongruous, the park is also pretty cool. The ships and cranes and machinery right next to the park are all impressive. There’s also a habitat planting with some natives struggling against weeds and a path out to a great view of the Bay Bridge and the city. The water area of the middle harbor is being converted into a mudflat, slowly getting filled with the silt from dredging of the channel. It’s a good place to see water birds.

And the park is a great place to see the sunset. Information and a map of the park is here, a historic photo with the training walls visible on the left side is here.

This weekend I pulled out our summer veggies and started most of our winter plants. It was a little late to be taking things out; our basil was starting to brown from the cold, the green beans were being eaten by a pest, and the zucchini was still healthy but had slowed its production. (I had planned to wait until we finished our garden shed, but that project has gotten more ambitious and is taking longer than I expected. The shed will be very cool when it’s finished, but for now it’s just at that tantalizing phase where we can see what it will be like but can’t yet use it.) After five winters at this garden, everything this winter will be plants we’ve grown before — favas, snap peas, beat greens, chard, kale, broccoli, parsley, radishes. There’s less of it this year, as our veggie garden has been slowly turning into a fruit garden, with blueberries, huckleberries, currants, and strawberries now filling up the edges

The other change from past winters is the stone edging on three of the four beds. In August, I pulled out the old scrap wood edging I built five years ago and I replaced it with scrap stone from several recent projects. Some of the stone is a little small and raggedy on the backsides of the beds, but overall I had good stuff to work with and it was fun working with four different kinds of stone in one little area. I came up one stone short with the cabernet wall and I bought the two corner stones to use with the beige sandstone, but it was a near-perfect quantity with about eight of the little bluestone squares leftover and nothing else. The saw-finished sandstone is more contemporary than I would have chosen for our garden, but I really like it.

Without the zucchini it looks a little bare and and in need of more tidying, but the stone just makes it so much better.

My last post on Joshua Tree is from Barker Dam, aka Big Horn Dam. The park is a desert, but it received more rainfall a hundred years ago and homesteaders tried raising cattle there. A couple of ranchers in the area made a seasonal reservoir, first a rancher named Barker in the early 1900’s, then William Keys fifty years later. Personally, I thought it was a little weird to see this empty reservoir and rather jury-rigged dam in the middle of the desert. Keys was the kind of guy who would kill someone in a dispute and then make a stone marker to commemorate/brag about it afterwards, and some of that character (or lack thereof) shows in the design and craftsmanship of the dam. But the birds seem to like it and the visuals are interesting and it’s a stone structure on the national register of historic places, so here it is.

The reservoir was done in a couple of phases; the bottom nine feet are faced with rock and the upper six feet of concrete were added by Keys in 1950. He made a sign in a smear of concrete to commemorate/brag about this too.

The concrete had rock dumped in between the forms to save money. You can actually make a pretty nice wall this way if you place the rock a little more carefully and scrub more concrete off the faces off after you take away the forms.

Behind the dam there’s an interesting pattern of bathtub rings. Apparently the reservoir still fills to the top, flooding twenty acres during the wettest time of year.

There’s a second, lower dam below the main one, full of cattails living off the seepage.

And a cattle trough below the second dam. All in all, a funky little area.