Hands-on Garden Construction

Signs like these are not just humorous but often much needed disclaimers. A property, when it is being 'landscaped', too often looks like a major renovation with all the associated angst. And then there's the destruction connected with such an undertaking, which may well result in a funeral for many beloved plants. Clients are taught to expect a mass burial of most of the flora around any construction being done on or near their garden.

But is it right to give up on the idea that your garden can look good through the transition period, what ever the scale or the length of time? Just like children, gardens can and need to be appreciated at any stage in their development.

We just finished 40 feet of wall which surrounds a raised berm garden. We brought in over 15 tons of stone material. We didnt use a bobcat or noisy dusty power tools. We tried to be careful around the plants and shrubs while working. It wasnt difficult. It's how we like to work anyway.

At the end of a week of 'hands on construction' the new wall looks like it has always been there, and the surrounding property remained undamaged. The upper 'under construction' photo shows about as messy as it got. The photo below it was taken not months later, when everything had time to heal over, but yesterday, the day we finished the project.

Handy dandy obelisk.

I built a dry stone tree today. Well, it is more like a truncated tree with 6 cut off limbs. It's over 8 feet tall. I was inspired to build it after I came across a few longer stones ( that I thought would make good 'branches' ) and had put aside for just such a tree sculpture. One stone had a particularly nice curve to it. By placing another long 'double-branch stone' over it for weight, I was able to place it in the trunk, curving upwards, like a branch.

The trunk is about 2 feet in diameter and in fact the tree is built on the stump of a rather large ( 70 feet tall) pine tree that our son Robin the arborist handily cut down for us last month, because it was very dead and dangerous. Below is a clip of him cutting it down.

In the photo above Mary is seen planting a newly purchased, fragrant, climbing Hydrangea at the base of the stone tree. She wanted me to build her an obelisk for it to grow up on. I'm not sure what I built is exactly what she had in mind.

Anyway, now we have a stone tree as a monument commemorating the 70 foot pine tree, erected on the very site where it once grew.

Do not touch.

Dry stone wallers have only a few natural predators. Apart from power wielding town planners and permit officers, who make sure that only concrete contractors get any approval for municipal projects (in their continuous regime to eradicate dry stone walling and wallers in their natural habitat) the only other thing that poses any dangerous threat to the existence, and well being, of wallers is the looming presence and insidious incursion of the ominous plant species known as 'toxicodendron' in Latin, and commonly referred to as 'poison ivy'.

This dreaded 'weed of prey', if allowed to prowl unchecked and attack indiscriminately, can render an unsuspecting waller helpless, turning them into a writhing mass of itchiness within two days of exposure to its venom. In many parts of Canada wallers put themselves at risk anytime they are working in any area where there are rocky fields or overgrown farmland. Essentially the plant thrives in the same environment as most wallers do.

If it is hot day and a waller walks through a patch of the mature plant wearing shorts, or rubs against the plant with their bare arms, unless he or she has an immunity to the toxin, the poison ivy will affect them in an adverse and potentially disabilitating way. Contact with poison ivy can make skin bubble and fester and cause itchiness of unparalleled magnitude. Gasoline applied to patches of inflammation, if discovered early enough, can sometimes reduce the extent of the irritation. Prednisone and various special creams will often help the irritation to eventually subside in more severe cases.

Here we see a picture of the dreaded flora lurking about masquarading as a harmless broad-leafed plant amongst the grasses. Patches of the tender ivy are unobtrusively snuggled up to this small boulder, leaving any unsuspecting waller at risk who may be attracted to pick up such a rock and use it in their wall. Moving the stone, even while avoiding any skin contact with the actual poison ivy plant may still yield nasty skin irritation, just from handling the stone itself, which may have been 'primed' with toxic residue from the plants growing adjacent to it.

Thinking hands need to maintain a 'hands-off' strategy when working near this exploitive and sinister species of vegetation.

Thyme On Our Hands

Evan Oxland doesn't have thyme on his hands, but he does have sedum.. When he isn't traveling through Europe inspecting historic stonework, or at university upgrading his 'history of gardening' knowledge, or pouring over architectural stone or garden design material in books or online, then he is usually building walls with me here in Canada.

Here is a photo of his hands inspecting a sedum mat material that is a product designed and produced by Mathis Natvik of Navik Ecological in Guelph Ontario Canada. It is a perfect alternative finish for the top of a wall instead of using either flat or vertical traditional coping stone. These are mats that come in 1X1 metre squares and weigh 25 KG’s each (depending on water content at the moment).They are pre-grown on the ground and then can be installed anywhere, usually as green roof material, but we are starting to use them as a very nice wall capping material too. Walls with sedum tops look beautiful and soft, as if they have been there for hundreds of years. We topped one of the workshop walls at our festival last year with sedum. It looked great.

Evan and I discovered, by growing/testing various vegetative material, that sedum grows much better on Canadian walls than thyme or sod (sod topping on a wall is know in Scotland as 'turf-top'). Our first attempts proved to us that sedum could last the dryer hotter Canadian summer, though we still have experimental walls with both grass and thyme growing on them, and it is surviving reasonably well.

It is a treat to see plants and dry stone walls skillfully combined in a landscape. On the other 'hand' it is so sad to see a nice use of plant material but lacking any really inspired stonework around it, or the reverse, where the stonework on a property is exceptional but the plantings are glitzy and inappropriate.

What we need are tripple combination 'gardener-designer-wallers'. I am excited for Evan to keep 'thinking' and working in this direction (with his hands, of course)