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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One of the gardens created during the last eight years. I drive past it just often enough to forget about it and then have it hits me again with how many crosses there are (4229 as of 1/18/09).

Wikipedia has details about the memorial.

ryan 1/19/2009

The stoneworker’s artist-of-choice, Andy Goldsworthy, has a new installation in the Presidio. It’s pretty cool, a one-hundred foot tall spire made out of forty lashed-together Monterey Cypress logs, culled from aging, declining trees that needed to be cut down. After cutting them down, they lashed them together into the spire and planted new trees around it in the spots where they had cut down the old ones. The spire will eventually rot and have to come down, but by then the new trees will have grown up around it. 

From now until May 3, there’s also a small exhibition with some of the drawings for the project, some photos of the installation process, and a few small art pieces including this junior spire inside a closet of the exhibition building. 

The NY Times has an article with a nice photo of the spire. This video has some footage of Goldsworthy’s first log spire, the no-longer-existing Grizedale spire.

Rock of Ages #1 by Edward Burtynsky

I got excited during the opening of the new James Bond. During the big car chase, a character said, “They’re heading for the quarry!” I’m into quarries and figured something really good was going to happen. After all, the best scene in the last Bond was the chase through the construction site. But Bond-in-the-quarry was a little disappointing: no great stone moments, no Indiana Jones boulders, nothing particularly quarry-specific. Bond drives really fast, dodges a lot machine gun fire, then shoots the driver of the other car and wins. Note to villains: machine guns don’t work against Bond. 

I occasionally come across links to webpages about former quarries. I’m going to try to keep some of them bookmarked here. We’ll see how many I add over time.

Bringing Down Marble from the Quarries in Carrara, 1911, John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent did a number of works at the quarry in Carrara. My favorite is above, a rare instance where I like an oil better than the watercolors. Others from his Carrara paintings and drawings can be seen here.

Canaletto’s The Stonemason’s Yard

I also like a quarry watercolor by Stewart White.

Other paintings include Old Quarry, Rockport by Henry Aiken Vincent, Quarry of the Chaise-Mre at Fountainbleau by Corot, The Sand Quarry by Guillaumin, Chou Quarry by Gauguin, a series at Bibemus Quarry by Cezanne, Bibemus Quarry was also painted by Andrea Masson. I can’t find Childe Hassam’s series at Rockport Quarry online, and I don’t particularly like The Quarry Pool, Folly Cove, Cape Ann.

The best quarry photographs, including ones from Carrara, are by Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky’s website has a great gallery of quarry photos.

The best quarry scenes in film are the ones in Breaking Away. Garden State has a quarry scene too. I have mixed feelings about it.

Quarries and Beyond has the most info.

Quest has a writeup on some of the old quarries in the Bay Area.

Parc des Buttes Chaumont is probably the most famous park made from a former quarry.

Opus 40 by sculptor Harvey Fite, a quarry site turned into a massive dry stone sculpture. It’s currently falling down because he didn’t break his joints, but there are efforts to preserve it.

Robert Morris made an amphitheatre/scultpure from a gravel pit, Untitled (reclamation of Johnson Gravel Pit). Robert Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill is in a former sand quarry in the Netherlands. IHilary Anne Frost -Kumpf has a webpage about reclamation projects which includes info on the Morris and Smithson pieces, Opus 40, and a Michael Heizer piece Effigy Tumuli.

Quarry Garden in Shanghai Botanical Garden, a former quarry turned into a park, won an ASLA award in 2012.

Reordering Old Quarry, a residential landscape on a former quarry, by Reed Hildebrand also won an ASLA award in 2012.

Stone Quarry Hill Art Park

An article about the San Rafael Rock Quarry in Marin Magazine

A video about the Quarryman, a rock climb at a stone quarry, has some historic footage of quarrying.

A visit to the marble quarries near Pietrasanta, a collection of photos from that area by the Atlantic, and an article in Stoneworld about Henraux quarry

Bernhard Lang aerial photos of Carrara

Rapolano, Italy

The Cactus Garden in a former quarry at Guatiza in the Canary Islands

Carrieres de Lumieres in Provence

Former quarry in Italy

  

sustainable sites native garden case study

Sustainable Sites Initiative has a collection of case studies that illustrate green building practices. The most interesting to us is Garden/Garden:A Comparison in Santa Monica, where the city installed a traditional front yard lawn garden and a low-water, native, sustainable design garden on adjacent lots so that people could see the side by side comparison. 

The native garden cost about one third more to install, $16,700 vs. $12,400; that cost difference came from the installation of a DG walkway to replace the existing concrete walkway and installation of rain gutters and a stormwater infiltration pit.

The native garden used 77% less water, 283,981 gallons/year vs. 64,396 gallons/year.

The native garden generated 66% less green waste, 219 pounds/year vs. 647.5 pounds/year.

The house and yard of the traditional garden look like relics from the sixties. I sure wouldn’t want my front yard to look like that, so I salute the owners taking a hit for science.