The American Garden Conservancy

Here's an event Im looking forward to....

Sat, May 5 2018
10:00 AM- 4:00 PM

Admission to each private garden is $7 for members and nonmembers without tickets purchased in advance. 

Buy discounted admission tickets in advance! They can be used at most Open Days to make garden visiting easier.
Nonmembers get 6 visits for the price of 5 with advanced ticket book purchase. 
Members get 50% off ONLY by purchasing ticket books in advance.

 Digging Deeper programs:
At the Mullins' Mendocino Stonezone in Gualala: Stone work demonstrations and Q & A throughout the day with lead project craftsmen, John Shaw-Rimmington from Port Hope, Canada, Kevin Carman from Art City in Ventura, California, and John Fisher of Fort Bragg, California. Free with garden admission.
2 PM - Bonsai styling and presentation and display with award-winning bonsai expert Bob Shimon. Free with garden admission.

At the Gualala Arts Center in Gualala: Stone work demonstrations with Stone Foundation members/artists Kevin Carman and John Shaw-Rimmington will answer questions about their stone installations at the Gualala Arts Center throughout the day.
1 PM - Executive Director, David “Sus" Susalla will give tours of the Global Harmony Sculpture Garden.

• 
  Mullins' Mendocino Stonezone
  

  SAT 10:00 AM- 4:00 PM • 44600 FISH ROCK ROAD. GUALALA, CA, 95445

  Situated among the magnificent redwoods of Northern California, this scenic coastal property allows visitors to explore a myriad of whimsical stone structures, garden follies, and sculptural installations...
• 
  The Gardens at Harmony Woods
  

  SAT 10:00 AM- 4:00 PM • 44380 GORDON LANE. MENDOCINO, CA, 95460

  The Gardens at Harmony Woods, nestled into a cathedral of redwoods, reflect a penchant for collecting an enormous range of unusual and beautiful plants. The emphasis is on rhododendrons and conifers...
• 
  Gualala Arts Center
  

  SAT 10:00 AM- 4:00 PM • 46501 OLD STATE HWY . GUALALA, CA, 95445

  Gualala Arts Center is a 15,000-square-foot visual and performing arts venue on eleven acres of redwood forest that sits one-quarter mile from the Pacific Ocean on the Mendocino Coast.

  
  

https://www.gardenconservancy.org/open-days/garden-directory/mullins-mendocino-stonezone

Bridging Across Pontypool

A photoshop rendering of how the Pontypool dry stone footbridge will look. 

 A unique stone arched footbridge (using no mortar or formed concrete or metal beams ) will be constructed by students taking the special 6 day bridge building seminar to be held near Pontypool (near Bowmanville), Ontario the from July 9th to July 14  2018. 

A beautiful permanent dry stone bridge with stone post handrails will be built to replace the old wooden bridge situated on this lovely property about an hour northeast of Toronto . It will span nearly 10 feet across a narrow manmade pond and will become the focal point of this spectacular sunken rockery garden.

The course will be held over Monday to Saturday, leaving the Sunday as an option to finish up if there is delay because of weather .  It will be taught by John Shaw-Rimmington and one other instructor. Participants will get a unique experience having a full 'hands-on' experience learning to build a traditional Scottish ‘packhorse' bridge with cobbled walking surface. 

The course fee is 200 dollars a day and has been deliberately set low to encourage stone enthusiasts, with or without experience, not just professionals. In addition to students having the standard instructional printed material provided for this DSWAC course, registrants attending the  Pontypool  Mitchell’s Bridge Workshop will get a copy of my recently published book How To Build Dry Stacked Walls and Bridges. If time permits during the build there will be field trip visit to at least one other other dry stone bridge in neighbouring Northumberland County . Lunches will be provided.

                               

All inquiries about attending this course should be directed to mcclaryharris@sympatico.ca or john@dswac,ca  This course is limited to 6 students.

A pictube is worth a thousand worbs

It struck me how close these totally unrelated but adjacent retail businesses signs registered as 'Dry Stone Wall Structure'. Is it just me?  

Mother Earth News Magazine Apr/May

Taking on the task of building a dry-stacked stone culvert — that is, a stone culvert that doesn’t use mortar — presents the very satisfying opportunity to build something that’ll be strong enough for you to drive a vehicle over and will look very much like a beautiful dry-stacked stone bridge. There’s no reason to go with bags of sand or cement, blocks, plastic, metal, or anything man-made in your finished culvert. With a little bit of effort and the right stone material, a culvert can become the showcase of your property. After all, it’s the first thing people will see when they pull up to your drive. Why not make it stunning?

 mother earth news.com

Equi-Rocks

The equinox, the seasons, and the changing length of daylight hours throughout the year are all due to one fact: The Earth spins on a tilted axis.

The vernal (tr. spring) equinox (tr. equal night) is upon us today, Tuesday, March 20th.  Both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres will be experiencing an equal amount of daylight hours. For those of us here in the Northern Hemisphere, it marks the beginning of SPRING, with daylight hours continuing to lengthen until the summer solstice in June.

The green arrow on the rock shows an imaginary revolution of a rock representing for the purpose of illustration - the earth on its axis) It has equal shaded green to non-shaded green. This shows on one spin of the earth there is equal length of darkness to daylight at the equinox.

The green arrow in the photo below showing the orientation representing autumn and winter months prior to the equinox, when the earth axis is turned away from the sun, has more of its circular length in darkness,  and so we in the northern hemisphere, up to now, have had days with less daylight (and thus nights are not equal to daylight time. We've missed our time in the sun.

But now it's time to have fun in the sun, 

because...

Spring is nature's way of saying. "Let's Party"

(sorry, for all of you down under)

Multi-Dimensional Stone

Time is a kind of weird 'extra' dimension that can be added to the three dimensions that we commonly understand 'space' to be.  

How would four dimensions look if we tried to show it the same way we see this three dimensional cube (above) on your two dimensional iPhone or laptop screen?



Below is a view of hypercube rotating in four dimensions, where (in four-dimensional space) all eight cubes are always the same, but here are being visualized as having perspective, just the way the rotating three dimensional cube is being 'visualized' in two dimensions above.






There are lots more dimensions, scientists tell us.
Time is divided into three dimensions. Past, present and future. So that makes 6 dimensions already.

How do we show a 6 dimensional object? - Say a three dimensional object (like our cube) as it is as it was and how it will be, - visualizing all 6 dimensions on the same screen?

I'm not sure.

Then there are the dimensions of 'possibility'

How many?

Scientists can't say, but we know there must be lots !

But here's the thing, I figure that stone contains all the dimensions.

Stone is all 'potential', in '3d space', and in past, present and future 'time'.

Don't ask me how I know. I just know.

And so, because we've been given so many dimensions to work with, anyone who understands and tries to create with it, will always be able to do really cool things with the stuff.
Dimensions in stone 

Thanks to Nick Leung for explaining and demonstrating some of these concepts on his website.

What makes a dry stone waller

Here's a short video that pretty much sums up how I feel about my job. Good stuff. Walling is the best.

Irish stone dough.

When dry stone Waller Paraic Poil was visiting here from Ireland he helped out with a big stone wall project Mark and I were working on. While he was staying With Mary and I, he fancied having some home made bread and showed us how to make his mother’s traditional Irish soda bread.

I noticed he took great care mixing the combining the brown, white flour and the baking soda with the right amount of buttermilk so that the dough was not too moist. After he had firmly kneaded it into a round fleshy lump it looked not unlike a round rock. 

Lots of parallels have been made comparing stones and bread. What was particularly interesting for me however was the visual of the relationship between ‘dry stone’ and its doughy counterpart not being too moist, or rather being ‘dry’ enough. A wetter mixture would be incorrect. It would be too gooey to work with and would not hold its shape, nor would it have the right look or yummy taste after it was baked.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

Have a nice day

Sometimes it's too easy, almost glib to merely tell someone to 'have a nice day'. How does one actually implement that suggestion if its cold and miserable and you still see snow on the ground? 

I'm not sure. But I do know that if you spend a day or two in the middle of May learning how to build with stone (no mortar) almost always, something nice is bound to happen .

A two-day beginner's dry stone wall workshop is planned for the weekend of May 12 to May 13 2018. Participants of all ages will learn the craft of dry lay construction as we continue to build another interesting section of dry stone wall, which eventually will become part of a dry stone gate entrance to a beautiful rural property near near Port Hope Ontario Canada . 

Join us for our 'Let's-Celebrate-Spring-Walling-Event'
 
This unique hands-on wall building course will be taught by proffesional waller and stone sculptor John Shaw-Rimmington. Cost for this two-day hands on seminar including printed instruction sheets, lunches for both days and a possible audio visual presentation on Saturday night is only $250. For more information please write to mcclaryharris@sympatico.ca

Clouds

No erosion, faintest wear

Some icy patches here and there.

They weather well exposed to air 

I’ve looked at walls like clouds.

But now they only build with block 

The reigning king is 'cultured rock’

So many things make piles of crock

Cuz none of it is real.

I've looked at walls and clouds both, now

From real and fake and still somehow

There’s no pollution with real walls

Which don’t make clouds of dust at all.

Both Sides Then

The Welsh equivilent to a Cornish hedge is the Clawdd, pronounced ‘cloud’. It is all dry laid using local stone laid vertically, and packed with dirt infill and sod/turf on top.

In Oct of 2012 at our Dry Stone Walling Across Canada festival near Montreal Quebec, Akira Inman and Andre Lemieux (standing both sides of the clawdd) were taught how to construct this unusual type of wall by our special guest speaker and professional waller Sean Adcock, and then, with help fromother students, all under Sean’s clever supervision, together built this lovely example, which Sean then photographed.

Dangerous substance

How is it that of all the possible high-tech or suspicious looking things that get detected in people's carry on bags at the security check line at the airport, it's still a simple rock that gets them all confused and requires that you be taken aside and open your bag very slowly

Spring Ahead

Our dry stone sundial at Fleming College needed shifting several degrees yesterday to adjust for the time change. It took a lot of time to move, (about an hour) but it'll take way less time when we change it back in the fall. 

Tumbleweed

I found it amazing to see in many places during my travels to various parts of central and southern California, real live ‘tumbleweed’ - or rather, real dead tumbleweed.  You see the stuff rolling across the highways as you're driving along and can’t help noticing lots of round prickly clumps of it eventually ending up in people’s gardens and dotted everywhere along the dry flat California landscape. 

It occurred to me that dry stone fences might be useful in stopping this invasive weed spreading across pastures and grazing farmland . Beautiful walls made of natural stone everywhere would then not just be considered to be a very practical form of ‘livestock containment’, it would also be a very useful type of .......‘deadstalk containment’ too. 

Grinding out some new lyrics

It's a dusty job 

with a noisy tool,

That I try not to use 

shaping stone as a rule.

But today I am working 

just as fast as I can

But I'm not gonna breath 

all the dust and sand

Cause I'm gonna be a

Paper mask grinder 

Paper mask grinder 

Paper mask -

grinder

It's a couple of bucks, 

give or take a few.

I'll be using more masks 

in a week or two.

I could use them longer, 

if they didn't clog up.

Turned inside out

man they really suck.

Paper mask grinder,

Paper mask grinder

Paper mask -

grinder 

Flaws

To work with flawed material is to decide to discover a perfection that could not be atttained with expensive primo material.

Context

Even though the common dry stone wall is a fairly adaptable creature and can survive in almost any environment, over thousands of years of development it has acquired a taste for a certain amount of visual refinement, and often prefers to be around architecture that is not just pragmatic. 

The wall we had the opportunity to build this week with leftover stone material, though it looks terrific and enhances the look of the building in the background, will always look better when it is one day ‘teleported’ from its industrial location to a more pastoral location, with a house, maybe similar to the one in the photo. 

Like so many things involving stones and style - it has a lot to do with context.

Flawed material has the most perfect potential for improvement .

Hoping to somehow create a masterpiece this week with all these broken pallets of leftover random stone material, all of it presenting a rather underwhelming pallet of colour and visual interest.

Having to use only broken, sawn, guillotined, mortar-stained stuff to build a good looking structural dry stone wall presents a bit of challenge. But there is always hope. And how often with stone - hope prevails.

What appears to be a sorry selection of flawed material,   with some care and imagination, magically can come together still to make something that often looks close to perfect.

Croc in the Rock

There for the Comparison

Without having something in the photo to compare with, it's difficult  sometimes to comprehend the overwhelming presence, the impressive power and scale of what it is your'e looking at.
That's why I made sure the rock was in this picture of me. 

The Wave

Sean Donnelly’s dry stone installation The Wave as interpreted by me in the inspiration of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, also known as The Great Wave or simply The Wave, a woodblock print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai

Here is a short video about The Wave

Impasto

Impasto is a style of painting using heavy strokes of thick paint usually with a pallet knife. It seems to be a good technique for depicting stonework. In this case, the impasto ‘look’ of the fireplace we completed this week is accomplished using a digital image and then adding a special filter from an app called Glaze. 

The clip below shows the three rocks I tried to paint ( not very successfully ) in that same digital impasto style and then morphs into the final filtered digital image, as a kind of comparison. 

The impasto technique highlights the gutsy textures and irregular plasticity of the surfaces of the stone, while still capturing the gesture and recognizable ‘impression’ of the human form. 

For anyone looking to create more impressionistic images, of dry stonework particularity, it would be worthwhile practicing painting in this style, or merely experimenting with impasto filters.


Link to short clip >  twitter.com/thinkinstoneman

Stone versus metal

It’s funny, compared to the numberr of pics one comes across showing family members posed in front of their new stone fireplace, how few photos there are of folks standing there, showing off a new oil, gas or wood furnace.

Making a mountain out of a hole in the wall

If you can't come to the mountain, bring the mountain to you.  

Standing up for Ca.

Canada Rocks, even in California. We've been revisiting some sites of past dry stone walling advenures here on the west coast. I’m standing in front of the Canadian section of the International Wall which students and I built in Ventura a few years ago.

I’m happy to report it’s looking to be in fine condition. 

The painterly word gets inferred

I've always been impressed with the Impresschists. I do like creating artistic features with mica - quartzite too, but schist is the best material for doing any kind of dry stone work, for my Monet.

I’m liken stone a lot.

The liking of certain things sometimes grows on you very slowly.  I never enjoyed eating vegetables like sweet potatoes and squash when I was young, but as I got older I eventually developed a taste for them. 

Rocks have likes and dislikes too. While it seems to us that they don’t seem to mind being covered with this coloured scaly stuff,  lichens (and other things that grow over the surface of rocks ) do in fact grow on them very very slowly.

I wonder if people who work with stones and rocks for a long time might gradually develop a lichen for the same things.  

Culvert Cairn

For anyone who uses a stone saw quite sparingly I think this video is still worth watching. The finished piece of Goldsworty’s is stunning, however I can’t help but think many of us would have preferred to see it created in a more time honoured way by craftsmen using hammers and chisels a lot more than is shown here. I’m less interested in seeing all the dust of machinery doing the work (music is cleverly dubbed over the screeching noise ) and much more curious about the process wherby skilled masons used merely hand tools to build the many many incredible stone culverts all over America and Europe in the past.

https://vimeo.com/96944998?ref=em-share

Grazed Landscape

Walls and terraces and man made features help define a landscape. In some cases, as in the foothills of the Sierras the lines of definition comes from an animal source. The textured contours of all the hills that I’ve tried to paint here are created by the constant grazing of cattle along parallel lines in narrow terraced elevations around the sides of all the slopes. I find it fascinating. As if the hills are made of many layers of stacked pieces of corrugated cardboard.

Stoneburst

Press 

V

Stoneburst

Stoneburst.  A dazzling compilation of shale and jasper boulders set in a 90 ‘ mica schist quartzite vertically laid dry stone wall we built recently at near Gualala.

Cellular

To me, the most satisfying arrangement of stones always seems to be a cellular pattern.

All the words in the thesaurus to describe cellular help form the image of what stone possibly in it's essential  nature is becoming, or in some distant past, has come from.

amoebic

anatomical

animate

basal

biological

biotic

elemental

essential

fundamental

inherent

integral

live

living

necessary

nuclear

original

plasmic

primary

prime

primitive

principal

Friction

Friction keeps us here, 
just like rocks perched on steep shelves

on the sides of a canyon,

fiction keeps us able to stay in contact

able to hang on.

If things were smooth we'd fall into the abyss,

we'd fall apart.

We say we don't like friction,but what do we know?

Friction is the glue,

the stuff of walls 

and monuments throughout history to love and purpose

And without it we float off...

The stones grip each other, silently holding on 

resting 

waiting

Friction isn't that bad.

it's not like prison. 

it's not like a slippery slope.

it's the stuff of resolve 

Of sticking to it 

of patience  and hope.

It's by friction we rub off on each other a little bit.

we nestle better together,

and hold on fast and slowly,

love each other.

No one has gone there

It seems there are so few untouched places. No matter where you go to get away to experience new territory, new land, new vistas, someone else has already gone before and left their mark. 

And yet ,there still exists a wonderful wilderness in all its pristine untouched beauty, left for you alone to explore . Somewhere there in your own unique imagination it's waiting to be discovered .

Fire Wall

Something or someone was gallantly watching over the two ramparts at Grant Park Ventura . While the ugly urbanite walls were badly singed, the fire barely blackened one corner of the southern dry stone structure.

Checking for fire damage

The huge ‘international wall’, built by our students during the very ambitious Stone Foundation stone symposium of January 2011 at Grant Park in Ventura, was completely surrounded by the recent fires that raged in this area for days last month, but the dry stone wall and ramparts remained miraculously untouched. Chared earth and blackened branches could be seen within inches of the structures.    More photos to follow .

Much of Grant Park suffered considerable fire damage . It will be closed for a while .

Anthropomorphic Limerick

There isn't a nomenclature, 

For rocks that lactate, I am sure.

To say stones need 'weaning',

Lacks geological meaning.

Since 'nurture' just ain't in their 'nature'.