Steve Snedeker’s Landscaping and Gardening Blog

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She lives 3,900 miles from here on a different continent, but Helen Nock’s inspired craftsmanship just about ripped my heart out. I have rarely had such an avid appreciation of someone’s excellent work – and make no mistake, there sure are plenty of folks who do amazing things – but Helen’s work had me from the get-go.

The two bird baths – above and below -  give an idea of her material and her general concepts. She – like me – loves mosaics and the crazy imaginings one can get from colored glass. Yes,  it’s a weakness, I admit it.   I thought the Indians got a great deal selling Manhatten for $22 worth of glass baubles, myself. I’da been cheaper! I am moved by the baubles made by the human hand. Just as the stained glass in the great churches moved men and women to forget their meager and hard-fought existences, witnessing God’s glory and the promise of better lives in those Holy Places – be they Mosque or Temple or the Great Cathedrals of Europe – now, from the hands of fabulous craftsmen and women such as Helen Nock, we get yet another near-religious experience. We are now enabled to witness a shameless exposure to radical artistic design – equally powerful in many ways and definitely as mesmerizing.  Helen – like the architects of those inspirational devices of churches – also loves experimenting with her own version of killer baubles, enjoying the dimensional frames they fool us with and beguile us with so dearly – and with a playful sense of love at the same time. Art with a smile never looked so good.

So? It’s A Garden Fer Pete Sakes!!  Get Real!

Sue me! What could be cooler? I’m just a gardener!!

These handcrafted products bring ferocious and gorgeous new colors into a garden, all season long – no matter the season. Plus, Helen has a hysterical take on symmetry going for her too – balance is structural, by all means, but hardly designed that way above her very substantial steel footings. I find much of her work positively “Antonio Gaudi-like” and love it. In those times of the year when color is so desperately desired, we have this incredible artifact – or many others shown below by way of tables, seats, bird baths or just standard ornamentation – all glitzy, translucent, shimmering and special and all our own. Man, am I ever a fan!

Here’s a close up of the picture above – and, yes, please ask about materials…………

This isn’t some small time girl.This is a serious pursuit and we gain from these gorgeous artworks.

I have no problem whatsoever in comparing what she does with the great artisans of our – or any – era. Art is a trick – we take standard average elements and make them something far, far more than they began with. At my most presumptuous, I think that about my best work. Helen Nock, as many others of us, works hard at her chosen craft. Her products are often commissioned by individuals with very particular wants. Take this Sunflower Table for example:

A stunning fact of her work is not just in its artistic sensibility alone, either. These items are not your everyday flimsy, department store items. They are made with the connivance and aid from her local blacksmith, as Helen’s demands go to such materials as Stainless Steel, bronze, copper and the slates and stone sets which need a firm footing, attached for super permanence. These are, after all, outdoor products for the most part. They need to accomplish sturdiness and stability facing the greatest conniving for failure devised by man or Diety – children, for one thing, rain and wind and the elements in general, for others – including freezing and thawing. Outside of the Sun, Nature’s most  universal killer of man made things is the alternating temperature during a day’s passage.

Her “smithy”, Nathan Bennett, is a busy man, and thorough. Not only do they conspire to build these edifices extremely well, they build them to last. And not only do they build them to last, but Helen does these series’ of acid washes of the metals themselves, bringing colors out with each application, fastidiously producing her desired product. She works until she gets it right. I think I like this aspect best, but then I would. The thrill of producing permanent things is a wonderful accomplishment.

Here are her own words as to how she arrived at this craft: (from her website profile)

“I was formally trained in fine art and design with a special interest in painting but a series of unnexpected turns led to my current practice. My professional carreer began working with teenagers and young adults disaffected by mainstream education shortly after gaining my B A Hons as a mature student. A fantastic six years of lecturing and teaching both professionally and personally stretching, but by September 2006, I felt the need to focus my own practice.

I assumed a return to painting on a full-time basis but working in a disused stone quarry surrounded by wildlife, some training on the resident blacksmith’s forge and a strong interest in nature and natural materials strongly influenced my decision to make beautiful and unusual things that live outside. The metal working opportunity led to developing work where I could integrate wrought iron, and commission the blacksmith to manufacture from my designs.  Exploring mosaic method seemed a natural progression to combine with wrought iron furniture.  Latterly, I explored the potential of mosaic method for individual sculptural work. I will use a range of methods and material as work and inspiration suggest, not all exclusively mosaic but my abiding interest in mosaic method is fired by it’s flexibility and hardy utility, and diverse possibilities it offers in combinations of media and technique.”

Works for me!! 

Here is Helen herself, decked out in her most decadent and oh-so-fashionable working attire and doing those lady-like things we all expect our wimmins to do.  Yes, she is grinding away with a Super Industrial strength grinder. Oh still my heart!!! That grinder, by the way, is like what we use for shaving cement blocks and bricks. It is about as safe as a loaded gun and needs that much care to avoid accidental disaster – they are, in fact, so powerful, they can also ruin some work in a split second, too.

(She’ll kill me for this, I am sure, lol) Hey. I’m in love, don’t listen to those other guys! 

What we get, from the developer of this art’s perspective, is this – the elemental series of constructions I found incredibly fascinating, to say nothing of the end product:

Raw stuff:

A forged stainless steel detail:

The Home Stretch – almost there!

Still some buffing necessary yet:

Final Product:

Pretty amazing stuff. Here is her website:  http://www.helen-nock.co.uk/sculpture–and-wall-art

This is where she exhibits just some of her stuff. A word – she also does sculpture and she also does – get this – lighting for gardens, which I show here. This one is entitled “Wall Urchin”:

Here it is, lit up:

Helen Nock. My current most favorite artist in the world and also a great gal, I hasten to add. I’ve only spoken with her by mail, asking her permission to spread the Great Word and we definitely made one another laugh.

There can be no higher praise.

Thanks, Helen and keep it up!!

She does a great Pig, by the way!! And in a shirt, no less, for the more modest of us.

Absolutely wonderful work.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…………

My good and hard-working friend Rick Barrett analyzes his most recent impossible situation, looking for clues. We got a call from a designer in Portland who designed this most interesting water feature from the comfort of her drawing board. While we agreed it would be a beautiful edifice, we also wondered just how we’d pull it off. The notion of hanging the deep black slate, composed of various thicknesses but the same color, off a block cement wall posed some bizarre and – to us – new material. It would have to be cement, owing to the varied thicknesses of the slate. All sort of adhesives could do the job, but the thickness thing hung us up. We needed a material which would allow us some “squeeze room” in order to have the absolutely perfect outer dimensions to align. Anything other than perfection – with water flowing over it – would show up like crazy.  And this referred not only to the top lip, where it would be grievous if not straight, but the front and sides as well.

Of course, I neglected to mention that the plan also called for adding real rocks at the front and a corner of both levels of the falls system, making the cement idea even more emphatically needed.

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So we arrived at a conclusion – erect the walls first, then nail burlap to the block walls, which would give the cement something to grab onto. It would also allow us just enough “wiggle room” to align all the slabs of slate so that they matched at every possible angle. Now, inasmuch as we are working with a natural stone product, total perfection would be absurd, layered and split as they are. But I believe Rick  got very, very close.

He’s a working dude!

I missed many episodes, picture-wise, as the construction proceeded, which I now regret. Often, we were busy elsewhere from the rear of the home, working on the landscaping out front or one the sides, which involved irrigation and the construction of some garden carpentry projects.  Rick did almost every bit of the water feature by himself. He also – it bears mentioning – erected the stone walls. I thought his work was masterful and so did the client and even the designer.

The blue tarp, for the record, was not only handy for preventing the brick walls from getting splashed with wet cement or from the splatter from the debris of brick and stone-cutting, but it also doubled as a “rain roof”, keeping the guys and the stuff dry.

Generally speaking, here it is on the day we pretty much left, all done up and proper.

Quite a change from the first shots…………..note the stones – and not only the Basalt Chrystal cemented around using that “exposed aggregate” concrete finish. Note as well the insertion of natural stones by the bottom basin as well, sort of stuck into the patio floor finish. It added a natural touch. The patio is also cantilevered over the water, allowing us to hide the water pump which sits in the bottom basin. There is far more to this project than meets the eye, I guess is what I am saying.

A bit longer view -

Now closer -

With some cool garden carpentry in the form of these trellises.

This was an interesting project, also.

A path meandering through a garden can serve many purposes. They can be fun, enlightening, whimsical – they have a gazillion different possibilities. Their substance can be paved or loose gravel and every thing in between – in fact, the composition and the design of garden paths could be a website and a discipline all its own.

Obviously, the most common reason for a garden path is to allow persons to see and work there. The other “most obvious” use is to actually get somewhere – across a garden to the back fence, to a shed or facility. But it can often be “designed for discovery” – small surprises beyond the eye which are revealed by traversing the path. It can be designed for an overall organic focus – a sort of ‘Feng Shui’ notion, operating to organize a garden into elements which not only stand out but which fit in perfectly with their surroundings. An open door or window in a fence can absolutely welcome us – revealing its “purpose” when we accept what it asks of us and we look or wander through it. In Classical Chinese Gardens, like this one in Portland, Oregon, both the composition of the walking surface and the openings play a role in making us interested as well as comfortable in a rather formal setting:

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Our own homes have a similar but different demand. We are less interested in being formal, for one thing. Plus, we don’t have budgets to support what a Chinese Garden can supply. We also have a secret: we can do whatever the heck we want and make it look good over time. And sometimes, simplicity rules anyway:

The basic idea is to keep the feet out of the garden dirt, to keep feet from compacting soil and disturbing the overall look in general. One can use any number of products – here, for example, is a system of round exposed aggregate stepping stones wandering around a water feature and providing access for a hose and a place to watch duffers plying their addicitons on the golf course below:

Natural stones, too, can provide a gorgeous walking system in a garden. Set close together, as in this grouping, it’s the next thing to a sidewalk:

This one winds for quite a while, out into the garden. From here:

Alongside this “swamp” we engineered – “where the wild things are!”   -for this Portland home, stuck as it was beneath the level of the road out front:

The series of Panorama pictures from my older files below show the path as it wanders alongside the edge of the bog. Its terminus is the little “mini patio” where the bench offers a relaxing place to enjoy the riot of all the various bog plantings we were able to conjure up, including flowers which don’t exist outside of real wetlands:

Please enlarge for the real effect.

A better view of the plantings. I always liked this project, right from the first. First of all, it was originally owned by Kevin Duckworth – a huge man, center for the Portland Trail Blazers pro basketball team for a while, all 7′ 2″ of him. (that’s about 2.25 meters for you non-Americans, lol). Secondly, it presented a humongous problem. Yes, the street and anywhere we could imagine to take the semi-copious amounts of drained water from this big site implied a pumping and collection system which was neither plumbed for nor electrically close by. We decided to go with a swamp/bog, knowing that the mosquito problem in Portland is hardly serious. It actually worked perfectly and, as mentioned, we were able to arrange plantings which grew so well that we had to thin them out after less than a year. Cool project. The circular thing below hooks up to a garden hose and rotates, swirling water out and creating small, real live rainbows.

Back to the pathways……….

On a drier scale, natural stones can be their own effect, set in a sparsely-planted, desert-like design:

Harsh but still interesting, with much outside the confines of the yard to attract the eye.

And there are more………..pathways to guide us and take us places – places to work or just admire.

The beauty is that anyone can install these themselves. These systems are made for the do-it-yourself landscaper who has some time and energy and a will to create his own space. The truth is, it is one of the single most enjoyable operations of installing landscapes. Give yourself a firm underside, slide your stone in place, fill up the edges of the stone so the tipping is minimized and you’re pretty much off to the races. Or, in this case, “off to the wanders”.

“Fractured Basalt” is essentially another name for rock and boulders who were displaced or dynamited apart to become either the boulders that they are or to become an excellent crushed gravel product, suitable for the bases of roadways the world over. They show a “fractured” appearance because they have been – fractured, that is.

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Obviously, I don’t hesitate to use them in water features of my own as the picture above testifies. Living in the West, we see relatively younger mountain ranges and stone complexes and it is not unusual in the slightest to see this sort of conglomeration. Aside from that, these stones have fabulous color and shapes. They combine well with other types of stones, to add to their appeal for a designing landscaper.

Arriving on a site, these boulders can be intimidating. Local quarries in both Reno and Portland, Oregon deliver this rock in massive, 20-25 yard quantities at the end of these long semi end dump trailers which reach to the sky when dumping. You want to give these guys some flat ground to dump on, trust me. Anyway, once you get a few of these loads, the work of selection gets intense. They come in wonderful and surprising shapes which challenge an orderly mind like few other things.

Arriving at a result such as the one below is weird ……………..when the picture below it is how you began

Pretty big mess……..    My favorite thing.

Just a bit later – But these stones are obviously not the rolled upon and rounded river and glacial rocks of the former post. These have edges, breaks and – often – fabulous color in their own right.

In yet another water feature, we can get an idea of the deeper colors and the variety of shades these basalt boulders have -

Some of the shades are remarkably different. Truly, not all fractured rock is “fractured basalt” – one can, in fact, find Quartz in the local mountains around Reno of impressive size and amazingly white or absolutely “clear” quality. There is a “Quartz Mountain” just west of town which has been a garden resource for countless devoted quartz lovers and gardeners. It used to be that people would drive up and just load out whatever took their fancies. Below is an idea of what one of these boulders looks like in its natural setting:

Here is a browner toned basalt piece in Portland we worked into a small water feature.

Split further, they make fabulous stones for walls and for garden path ways. We’ll see much more about the possibilities of garden paths in the very near future.

Back to the fractured basalt, here’s an example of yet another water feature, done in Portland, using the fractured rock.

We now venture back into “bubble rocks”, split or fractured rocks we like so much, we pay to have them cored for water to run over there surfaces.

And another:

I took a chance once using a mulch of this stuff – in a billion different sizes. There was a quarry nearby and the client was game to try something I mentioned I thought might work well. So we used the fractured stones as a mulch, in combination with larger pieces of the same ilk. I knew it would turn out good andf it did – right from the start.

It was a lot of rock!

A year later, it looked as good and remained nice and easy to maintain.

Even the front yard benefited from these interesting stones. I think the mixture of the deep green lawn and those gray-blue rocks are very effective.

I typically have worked with 3 major categories of rocks and boulders in the landscapes I have designed and installed. Since I am newly-arrived in Kentucky, the more “Eastern U.S.” types of boulders and rocks – the Shales and the Limestones – have not been much in my headlamps. I truly admire their potential as the prior post points out. Particularly the limestone slabs interest me, with their horizontal possibilities. The list of more Western boulder types is this:

1. Rounded River Rocks, smoothed by tumbling under glaciation and running water

2. Fractured basalt rocks, into which I include “Glacial Schist” – also included in the Basalt rock  column would be the pillars and crystalline rocks of basalt origin

3. Igneous rocks of particular individual merit……….and I guess I could include Fossilized Rock – ‘petrified wood’ – as well, since I have actually used it in landscapes.

River/Glacial Boulders

I find these multi-utility rocks. They come in large numbers, very naturally. Aside from how we view the West, it was real wet at one time, with glaciers advancing and retreating, big boulders and small ones tumbling under mile-thick coverings of ice. As well, many rocks sat under water and the incessant pounding of running water rounded them off into interesting and sometimes literally circular shapes.

In landscaping, I like using these for water features (insert “duh!”), owing to the natural affinity with water in all its guises. I use them also for constructing artificial creek beds which double for a site as drainage trenches, moving rainfall and snow melt off the property and directing it where we want it to go. These are a delight to construct:

We assume the most natural effects in making these. Notably, for example, water will encounter an obstacle – such as a large rock – and find a way around it, thus the curving parts of my artificial creeks have larger boulders at junctures where the bends take place. We also try and find what would be a natural course, including its origins. When things make sense, the senses agree.

As can be seen above, I also use these to solidify a hillside as well. Inserting boulders does indeed help with erosion control, sitting all hefty and attractive, they supply ideal locations for planting as well as for diverting tides of water.

The picture below has a bunch of grouped boulders “Keyed” to prevent an erosive collapse onto what will eventually become an expensive and very long concrete driveway. They retain a secure place, especially when we add channels to it which will direct the water away. Nevertheless, this being such entirely new, basically ’sculpted’ and not very compacted terrain,  and composed of soft, dusty, silty material, we did what we could to avoid future problems. It turned out, the first year, we were glad we did.

And we play, too, attempting to make remarkable pieces of art out of our soil and rock sculptures. For example, on this same property, we made sets of stairs out of large, up to one ton boulders, in two different locations. These stairs are not for everyday traffic but they were still functional, keeping one’s shoes out of the dirt and garden – the intent of any garden pathway.

The steps are on the right in this picture. If you enlarge it, you can far more detail and I am really not all that at editing pictures to show the features I want most to focus on. I just take them.

The above picture is taken at the bottom level, just as Spring had arrived and in time for us to address the disasters which a 100 year rain event had caused. We were more than a little glad we had taken what steps we did take to minimize erosion damage. It could have been worse. This project was about 6 months old at this time – in construction terms, from when we began.

This is another level up, between the home itself and a huge garage where garden tools and an RV shed are located. The stairs here are obviously on the right.

Other functional and very playful uses of these rocks carry a softening effect to hard surfaces -

The intrude into the lines we devise, offering a small anarchy

But my single most primary usages of these gorgeously-shaped stones is generally related to their natural affinity with water.

Don’t do these at home!!

Not all boulders are alike.

The Asian Section

Some even have titles of their own – “Shibumi Rocks” dot Japanese landscapes like these impressive doyens of timelessness who corner the market on Time itself. Many times, these gorgeous billions-of-years-old guys actually are the landscaping. These are the understated attention-getters who supply some peaceful perspective on those who pass and which abide in their Eternal reliability. Unless they fall over, of course.

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Other ‘rocks’ also fill this bill but in a far more bio-morphic – almost human way. Maybe even more to the point – in somewhat monstrous and unusual ways. The Chinese have perfected the art of placing boulders which are amazingly evocative. These things gather impressions for the more active parts of our imaginations as we get riveted by their near supernatural shapes. They probably most resemble those wild forms in the clouds we so often imagine resemble something we relate to. One can see shapes and guises for all sorts of imagined creatures and things in these amazing stones. That they fit so well into landscapes makes it even weirder somehow. The picture below is a “softened effect” as we see where the balance of plant and rock makes a fine compromise.

Somewhere else inside the Portland Chinese Garden, we get a different take or two. These suckers are plain bizarre:

These incredible stones and their distinctly unusual messages come naturally for them. There are formations which feature these sorts of stones and which occur in Nature there. The Chinese who send for these are the exporters for very specific and limited environments like these gardens which they themselves construct.

I could look at these all day:

But that is China and Japan. In both cases, they are able to work with what they have in their natural geologic environment. I recall, having worked on this garden, the stockpiles of these stones as they arrived and as they were put into storage. I was eager to see how they expected to use them in the garden. I now think their placement was perfect.

Through a hole they look sweet – not the first hole, either!:

The North American Section

Over here, we deal with a range of rocks and boulders which are really every bit as diverse, if not quite as weird in the same ways. We do have remarkable Shales and Limestones in the Eastern US which give us innumerable creative outlets. The stratified nature of limestone lends it to stacking and to flat planes. These are particularly impressive when used for water features, as these pictures from the corporate headquarters of Papa John’s Pizza illustrates – one of our favorite local Louisville walks.

Stacked, they make wonderful rockeries and informal walls for the surrounding foliage to fill out magnificently:

Here is a fabulous example of tasteful placement:

I’ve always loved this perspective of the sets of waterfalls at Papa Johns’:

Moving towards Jeruselum………………….we encounter another perspective………as the sounds of thousands of gallons of water plummet over rocks and fall……

Until we come to that place where we see what the ruccus is all about:

It’s way well worth the walk:

I’ll have to dedicate an entire post to this place soon.

Meanwhile…………..this guy is trouble with a Capital T:

Hopefully, it will be a while until he gets the key to my boat:

My brother Tom would be mad:  

How can one take a postage stamp-sized back yard and landscape effectively? The image below is of a home with a 15 foot by 60 foot rear yard. Grass was out of the picture, owing to allergies and a sense of water-conservation on the part of the owner. Glaring sun was another factor – relentless and hotter than heck with still air a factor from the high fencing.

Use rocks!

(left click to enlarge any image, sometimes twice for better detail)

A mix of perennials, some grasses, a shrub or two and a Decomposed Granite walkway gives us something which is at least interesting. This picture is about 2 months following installation and I can definitley say that everything grew remarkably well.

This property below was featured  in the post I made most recently. I just recently re-discovered these pictures I had misplaced. Here is how the Lunar Landscape evolved. Note the different types of rock. I used a river rock type in the creek bed, drainage swale and the more pretty igneous types in the rockery/bed. From these humble origins -

To this:

From This:

To this:

Below is the bare bones of a water feature project – among other facets of a complex operation – near a porch where we utilized Reno’s “rock assets” liberally. We “mined” a few of these and ordered up the more rounded river rocks. It can seem weird, featuring such a sun-burnt, crispy lichen-covered boulder such as this in the middle of a water feature, of all things, but the surprise element, mixed with its stunning color and texture was too much to pass up.

Honestly, using the river rocks is probably one of my favorite pastimes, in their billions of applications. As my companies have matured and individual “specialists” formed, it always seemed I would have one guy who took as much interest in making artificial creek beds as myself. Many projects would find me and “that guy” busy building little naturalistic creeks while the other slugs were off planting plants or making paver systems work.

It’s a weakness.  Hey!   Look!  Here’s a specialist now!

Mixing can be as fun – after all a certain shamelessness never hurt in design and installing one’s own particular set of rules and non-regulations.

There are times when mixing a blend of volcanic rocks with the smoothed-out Granite, river-washed look can be effective:

We revisit a favorite topic of mine and one into which I have invested hefty energies, through the years.

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Stones. Rocks. Boulders. And even their smaller children, if such a thing can be said.

Particular individual rocks such as the one below from Reno, Nevada are among my very favorites. Igneous by origin, attached with fascinating lichens coloring things up dramatically, these solo rocks are completely entertaining by themselves. There is a nearly embarrassing richness of these in the surrounding hills and valleys of Reno and I would often encounter them just beyond a property line then shamelessly scoop them up for my own selfish decorative uses, I admit. Typically, I would be taking boulders whose lives as natural beauties was on a limited time span anyway – as the neighborhoods developed farther out.  I pretty much stick to a rule of sticking within eventual expansion boundaries, for the record. Anyway – Handling them always presented a big challenge inasmuch as pretty much the last thing one wanted to do was erase the lichens. So rolling them was definitely out. Once again, we thank the Machine Lord for providing clamps and buckets for extracting these rocks in relative pristine fashion. We would even use chains and padding and lift them gingerly with our machine buckets

It was difficult to stay way from a tendency to want to make a totally Lunar Landscape out of this one. The boulders used here were all “on site”, parched and par-broiled in the sun up on the ever-sunny slopes of the foothills in the Caughlin Ranch estates in Reno, Nevada.

The above  was taken at a rather raw phase, soon after installation. It does indeed look quite “Lunar” – which is exactly what the lady of the house said as she watched it develop. Yet, it morphed into something alotgether different as time moved along, allowing a future where pruning and ignoring plants and surrounding effects could determine what look one wanted to cultivate – Lunar or lush?

There are some stunning igneous rocks in this lot. Enlarging this view, below, hopefully some of the color will come out as we check the boulders in the foreground. Honestly, many of these stones told stories all by themselves. It often felt like dealing with literal personalities.

Then we come to the “rolling thunder” edition of “Rockeria” madness and the role and placement of larger, glacial or river-produced stones – rounder and ’softer-effects’ sorts of rocks. For these, which can also be featured in the right spots, there is beauty in simplicity and plain size.

I’m going to divide this stream of posts up a bit more than usual. I’ll also enter them a bit more often.

I love time lapse photography. The developments of landscapes are one of life’s little rewards for those who install them. In fact, aside from the pleasure of rendering a bowl of dust or mud into something far more than that, it is the second-most Primary Benefit of the trade. You can enlarge many of these pictures by left-clicking.

Here’s a project whose photo’s were taken pretty much as we were leaving – the day we “finished” installing all the plants and mulches and what-not. I was supremely satisfied, feeling certain what we had put in would develop well. This is the “real” version of what many of these places look like when first completed. To say patience can pay dividends is quite an understatement. We worked within a tight budget here, selecting smaller sized plants from nurseries, opting for “more bounce for the gold ounce”. These guys were also incredibly good at taking care and nurturing their place, I hasten to add. Steve and Mary, I salute you! 

This was the result, not that long afterwards, I’m thinking 2 years:

Maybe an even  better perspective of the same angle:

Another perspective, same project. I am so in love with Penstemons, it’s almost sick, lol:

Same time frame:

The combination of intense and plentiful sun, mixed with a very, very scrupulous addition of brand new and upgraded topsoil in huge amounts, make Reno, Nevada – where this project was completed – almost uniquely situated to produce phenomenal growth in certain types of plants. Perennials absolutely love Reno, or at least the sun-loving varieties such as Penstemons, Lavender, Salvia and the likes. Give the soil a touch of acidity, give the roots a medium to grow in and – whoa! Needless to say, the Aspens shown here grow at an equally phenomenal rate:

Two years is a short period of time for a landscape. After one, this actually approached what it looked like.

And here’s a totally gratuitous look back:

And here we have another year under the belt, showing us yet more recent growth:

This next project was my business partner, Bill’s house. Now, this is a bit unfair, because we could tinker with this one on days off or when Bill had emergencies – like visits from family, lol. So we began with something along these lines, just after we completed the creek and waterfall (which we later raised!):

And the lawn! Can’t fergit the lawn!!

Anyway, these became something else, too (I think we improved the lawn):

And we wrought some other changes in a couple short years, too:

Incredibly, I actually get paid to do all this!

Then there are the Supremely Big Humongous Projects of acreage and plentiful dust. The onset of projects such as this are impressively intimidating as heck. Showing up with a 3 or 4 man crew makes the owners go “Huh?”

“You mean you work too?” (Truth is, I said the same “Huh?” when I saw the darn thing – in almost every case. It always seems to have an element of “Gulp!” to it, to be perfectly honest.)

My response is always “Sure! We ready!!” 

Starting with this you can plainly see there is a “ways” to the second picture, especially considering we placed those rocks:

But we did it:

From the other direction:

Next time, we’ll visit a water feature ‘time lapse’, where we will wonder how we got anywhere at all from here. Poor Leo, lol. Another day of liquid sunshine in Portland, Oregon!:

To here ( a nicer day :

To this:

In this Reno landscape project, taken in the construction process, here are some shots of a one acre lot, sloping in the front and pretty flat out back. It required that we build walls out front, to make an approach possible from the street and to welcome those who came that way. These guys also had a mass of concrete which was nearly overwhelming in its sun-washed brightness. It is why the addition of brick pavers not only widened the concrete sidewalk but it brought in an earth tone to border on green grass. The many paver pathways, the huge patio out back, the smaller patio in the front and the spa facilities to the East were instrumental in providing interesting surfaces and deciding the planes. (Note: Left click all images to enlarge)

The front yard consisted of a narrow walk which we bordered with bricks. The bricks were tumbled brick pavers, made to look antiqued before entry. It provided a softer touch to the hard surfaces and the hard lines all around the property.

The front walls were extremely fun to make. The material was called Celtic Wall Block, from a manufacturer known as Belgard Pavers. It is a top of the line product, very secure and with a rough-hewn frontal feature which appears stuck there long before now. Really cool wall blocks.

The front yard also needed some “hot” green in the person of lawn grass. The spacing came out fabulous as we got a legitimate lawn in a manageable space. It’s placement guaranteed a bit more moisture in the air and was – as always – pretty cool to walk in. I tried it myself!

It was interesting, finishing. We were able to acquire some great Tanyosho Pines which we used to frame the courtyard opening gate.  We also had some fun in the courtyard itself.

Further along, out back, we had a big patio to build with a fire pit and a nearby water feature. An fairly expansive lawn would cover the rest, with beds and planting beyond it.

It was a long process. Or it sure seemed so. But we busted it out anyway. We also added boulders, around which we put our pavers, to break the line a little and to hopefully supply an additional aura of  permanence.

I just thought some construction pictures was what this blog needed. And I am way into dust.

The Fire Pit was basic. No gas lines or any artificial source of heat. They were content to burn stuff. So we had to arrange for a nice informal protected pit for fires.

And the rest of the patio stretched on for a while. While this was not an estate job, the impression was what they wanted. The lengths and breadths of some of the walking features were huge. It made for an extremely lush and amiable environment.

We were delighted in how it all came out. Low lines, nothing outrageous, great color. I went a bit nuts on the color. Lots of perennials and roses. We had some fabulous Smoke Trees out front as well.

The water feature was redone later. The splash sound was too intense for conversation. But its size I think fits perfectly. Considering how dusty this place was when we began, there was no feeling bad with the results.

But, what we liked best were the walls.

The walls not only help so much with the grades and retaining them in place, they also are pretty cool just to look at. Attractive and solid, these – once again – were a terrific product.