Steve Snedeker’s Landscaping and Gardening Blog

“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 am running extremely whimsical with this. In a way, I am just showing pictures from my Mighty Massive photo file system which have not appeared here before. New blood, as it were.

It also gives a chance to plain have some fun without too much hyped-up thematic discipline, so it’s even cooler. The pic below is my brother Mike posing with our very own Mother, often referred to as “Mom”.  They both seem reasonably happy, so why not etch that rare moment on historical online Eternity? I lied, of course. We spend most of our time laughing, the truth is.

Anyways, sashay with me through various and sundry pictures, none of which match.

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Here’s a hole in the wall at the Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon.

Modernistic planting, somewhere.

A highly-suspicious plant.

Some interesting Iron Work a very good iron man did at a project of ours.

The Portland Japanese Garden is inspiring, quiet and beautiful. Even the fish agree:

Yew Dell Gardens in Fall. Dude could use a haircut and a shave.

Now, this is a river.

Multnomah Fall just outside of Portland.

I always loved traveling this stretch of road between Reno and Portland, Oregon. It was about 540 miles – which is a grind no matter how scenic – but this approach to Mt. Hood not only meant I was getting into more treed areas, it also meant I was within about 60 miles of home. Even in Summer – with the snow nealy gone – Mt. Hood was like a relaxing sight.

Dealing with the desert – you can find some strangeness, for sure. Here is a mulch only a lizard could love. The good news is it grew up nicely.

Prune This!!!!!!!!!!

This is a lot of moving water. 6,000 gallons a minute, to be exact.

Making Bubble Rocks can put you in some tight spaces.

And some are tighter than others:

I always have liked what we did in making this little creek.

I absolutely love this picture. I shamelessly add it here, not knowing where I got it. I hope the author does not mind.

“Sobering” applies to this military cemetery in Louisville, I’d think. It is amazing quiet here. Speaking as a veteran, I often wish more of us would visit these places. You’d be amazed at how many connections you have here and elsewhere.

You know you’re up early when this sight greets you on the drive to work. Of course, then again, it could be lunch time in the Yukon in December.

Would this be called a “Green Building”?

Here’s something you DON’T want to see when you get low on gas.

Those nutty Barcelonans will do anything for a laugh.

An interesting landscaping idea?

Here’s Louis XIV and an escaped horse in downtown Louisville.

This is what it’s like driving from Reno, over the mountain to lake Tahoe in Winter.

A patio and landscaping project in Portland.

You don’t see rocks like this every day. Nor woodwork, for that matter.

An interesting Architectural feature from the Portland, Oregon Chinese Garden.

The Truckee River as it courses through the midst of downtown Reno, Nevada. This shot is at the head of the fabricated kayak run, designed for competitions. Yes, it is in the middle of town.

A luxury swimmin’ hole we helped construct in the woods near Lake Tahoe. We did everything on top – just not the pool itself. The paving, rocks and all that are ours,

It’s funny how many people have asked me what a “Bubble Rock” is. I guess, since I have done so many, it just rolls off my tongue like any other noun. I even have a separate category all dolled up in the “Pages” section where you can see them all on their own. It might need some work. Hmmmm.

A “Bubble Rock”, in my lexicon, is a large rock which has had a hole bored through it. Now, what I like doing then is placing a water pump down near the bottom and sending water bubbling up through the top, thus the “bubble” feature. What gets accomplished is that these rocks then get very much featured, as not only the sound attracts attention, but then so do the innate colors and general features of the rock get highlighted as well. It goes without saying that many of these also have small spotlights on them at night – a groovy and very cool feature which adds a new and different dimension to the highlight. (Bear in mind, in many of these pictures – as always – they are taken as we complete projects. Therefore those little plants will look teensy-weensy. Believe me, they grow, later. We just get too busy to come back – or some fool forgets his camera when he does go back – all those things.) 

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Their placement becomes important as well. Because of their inherent possible compactness, they can be put into some relatively small spaces. I put many up near entrances to homes, for example, where their bubbling and peaceful sound can be enjoyed by anyone entering.

Others, we put out back – in or around a patio, so that the owners can enjoy those same soothing sounds a bit more selfishly.

Terrible photo, but it reflects the sun so well, I had to include it. It spends much time looking very much like this.

A better look, with a better picture, check those tidy “monoliths” out in the distance here:

These are just a few items of “Bubble Rock” interest. There is always an ongoing urge for the sounds of water in landscaping. These I have found very satisfying to customers, especially with the wonderful new technologies available in coring holes of that length, and through such hard materials. In the end, there is no end of possibilities for an imaginative designer or homeowner. Find a great rock and you’re off to the races, the truth is.

Sometimes we just add to an existing flow of a bunch o’water. This is an extravagance, to be sure, but it sure looks wet!

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The above is a picture of my daughter on one of our rambles, back in the day (sniff, sniff) when she was much smaller than she is now. But it has always been a favorite picture, and not just for the obvious fact of a Dad inordinately in love with his own child. What she is standing on is the subject of the day here. That, ladies and gents, is Basalt – your basic igneous rock and one which has developed a huge niche in the desginer hearts and minds of landscaping people.

Basalt – most notably “Columnar Basalt” – is found in great accumulations in the Columbia River Basin, here in Oregon and across the river in Washington state. Other major concentrations are spread throughout the world in places like the Giant’s Causeway (Ireland), Organ Pipes National Park (Australia), Devil’s Tower (Wyoming, USA), Russia, India, Iceland and many other locations. Formed into crystalline formations and often referred to as “hexagonal” – 6-sided – they can actually vary into polygons with anywhere from 3 to 12 sides. From Wikipedia: “Formed by the cooling of lava on the Earth’s crust, during the cooling of a thick lava flow, contractional joints or fractures form. If a flow cools relatively rapidly, significant contraction forces build up. While a flow can shrink in the vertical dimension without fracturing, it cannot easily accommodate shrinking in the horizontal direction unless cracks form; the extensive fracture network that develops results in the formation of columns.”

It then goes on to say that the slower the cooling process, the larger the columnar “crystals”. I have seen some very large crystals in my day – and even used a few. Later pictures in this post will illustrate this.

This is a smaller scale use within the confines a modern landscape and water feature in a retired couple’s small back patio area. Actually, this is a project which may have used the fewest basalt columns of all, but the location of the foreground “seat rock” does present an excellent minor vision of the polygonal aspect, as well as just one of many functions columnar basalt can be put to use for in a landscape. They do not have to be large to be quite effective. Their horizontal lines also present us with the gift of altitude and, therefore, perspective.

Harvested from vast fields of these crystals, as remarkable as we regard them, they are hardly rare, as the production picture from a Chinese Basalt source shows us below. The fact is, their large numbers bode well indeed for landscaping possibilities.

Bored right down their length and with a water pump hidden amidst the lower levels, they make excellent “Bubble Rocks”, for one thing. Bubble Rocks give the more gentle sound of water and bring out the rich color which is hidden in all rocks:

But there are larger and more forceful roles available for columnar basalt. Notice this waterfall the company I was with at the time built for Microsoft’s Campus in Seattle, Washington. Its construction resembles the picture of many basalt sources throughout the world in high mountainous regions. This was a pain-staking project but remains one of my very favorite constructions.

Below are pictures of other uses for this interesting material. These pictures are all taken at the Portland Zoo, a minor landscaping miracle utilizing the local products in novel ways – as seats and as retaining wall effects. This is hard by the zoo’s own bus stop leading to the buildings housing the elevator which takes people down about 500 feet to where they can catch the Light Rapid Transit train.

Hey, I think the theory here was: “If you got ‘em, flaunt ‘em!”

Just because we are heading towards a general water shortage – local exceptional climates notwithstanding – throughout so much of the world, the possible impact of a water garden does not need to be ignored. In fact, once a water feature is up and running, the recirculating nature of them all means that the same water is used over and over again. Yes, depending on the location and the size and nature of the water feature, water can be lost to evaporation and need topping off. But I have lived in some beastly temperatures where I installed many of these and I can readily say the loss from evaporation is not substantial whatsoever.

Believe it or not, I often term these as alternatives to lawns.

Here is a look at a larger water feature we installed in the woods. Most of the pictures taken here were taken the day we finally finished the project. There was no hole to begin with – in fact, we felled large trees to make room for this pond and trucked off the roots. It was the same sort of forest it is now surrounded by when we began – we just claimed the territory for ourselves and the client’s pond. Note the creek of running water spilling inside from the small hill behind. This recirculated water and cleaned and oxygenated it by running over a long series of pebbles and stones in the creek.

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Here are a couple of different looks at the creek in the above picture. The intense shade of this project made many things possible – a larger body of water which would evaporate far less than one in the Sun allowed us to forget about the potentially nasty effects of algae as well. After all, the Sun is the primary grower of algae. It did imply some extra maintenance dealing with leaves and droppings from the local trees, but that was actually fairly easy. The main thing was how the water cleaned itself in our creek, receiving oxygen in quantities which disallowed too much algae. Honestly, in spire of the size – which was huge – this was a very straightforward project.

A bit closer up, about midway down the 50 foot creek:

Here is the look from back on the deck, looking out from the house towards our creek. The slate-like surface is actually what is called “Bluestone”, a gorgeous and richly-textured stone of more like a granite appearance. The wooden deck is visible from this perspective, and it leads out into the water at the end of this portion of the deck.

This view is from across the pond. Note the deck – it is suspended an inch above the almost always-placid water surface, made to look as close as it actually is. Later, lighting was added below the deck for an unreal but rich lighting experience at night for party-goers and just the enjoyment of the clients. It was hugely effective.

Yes, that is an island in the middle of our lake. That was easily the toughest part of the entire construction and on which caused me a sleepless night or two. Don’t do this at home!

The bridge is the link between the home and the woods across the pond. The water on this side of the bridge was very shallow and represented an effort at creating a sort of swampland/wetlands area. We planted a few wetlands plants – sedges, a bamboo – inside later which grew at a fairly astronomical rate. Little did we know we had created the perfect wetlands. We had to return and thins it by about 80%!

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Below may be my favorite perspective of all at this project. It takes advantage of the water’s placidity to offer some really fine reflections. I absolutely adored the mirror-like quality of the water.

Once again, we got very lucky in the finishing touches. The woods around us were rife with all sort of great things to put at the water’s edge, making this place look as if it had been there forever.

So how did we get here?            Yes, that is East Reno/Sparks in the distance.

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From here?

Well, I am glad you asked!

It wasn’t easy, for one thing. Asked to construct this Infinity Edge Waterfall by the owners, Bo and Sandy, it joined a pretty large laundry list of items they were after. This was their “dream home” and they had saved and invested to get here and they most definitely had a “gamer’s take” on all the bells and whistles they wanted. They both had their own sets of wishes, Sandy’s more towards the planting end, actually, which made she and I friends. Bo, however, really wanted some hot stuff! We made him a Grotto – seen elsewhere in this blog – and he wanted a huge back patio with this Infinity Edge thing cut inside it. The pavers were of a really very cool – tumbled – variety and they already had them more or less picked out. Here they are at the front entry:

When he mentioned the Infinity Edge water feature, he had me. I had wanted to do one of these for long years. Negotiations went smoothly. Ach!  I will feature the entire yard soon – this was your basic mini-Estate. Lots of stuff going on here.

The other deal was that this was one “bony” yard. Truth to tell, there were approximately 800 yards of boulders and rocks parked there from excavations all around the neighborhood and which he had asked for earlier. Needless to say, in subdivisions like this, a builder is more than delighted to get rid of his overburden after excavations and, believe me, one shovel into this particular ground and you encountered rock. They were approximately as common as air. So we got a bazillion lungfuls of rocks.

Nevertheless, onward and upward we strove. First, we dug a hole. Ta da! Halfway there!

Then we began constructing the form. We would consult on the placement of the water edge by referring back to the dining room table and living room windows. From the living room window, one could – ideally – peer over the edge and see the lake down below.

The effect was water-into-water, sort of. So this determined our height, along with the patio which began at his circular patio nearer the house, but just stepped down a bit. The edge of this would determine how far down that step – or steps – would be. So we began.

The trick would be not only in getting the heights right but would also involve insuring that the form itself would stay there while the pouring cement was pounding it. We used a high classification (4500 psi) cement for this, to insure a better product in general. There would be no minimizing the cost – no short cuts. This was to last a while. And a crack would drive anybody crazy! The pile to the right in the above picture is the excavated dirt, by the way. The pile of rocks on the left are just a few of the jewels we had to play with, building extensive walls and that grotto.

Here is a look from the angle in the very top picture, more or less:

I personally drew out the form’s shape and we had painted it along the ground at various junctures during the set-up. We constantly checked and rechecked our levels, needless to say. Here is the form work up closer, getting to the point where we could refine the shape:

The rear “rim” – the swerving piece sticking up 4″ is built on plywood, by the way. This was a cantilever – a protruding cement pad extending out into the pond about 3 feet. Here’s another look where it shows just a bit better:

Please forgive the photographer because these were all taken after a day of work. Anyway, I think we are getting the point. We basically intensified some of the rebar, tying it all together and basically more or less doubling it up from this picture. We also added a light fixture under the cantilever – I mean a big one, too – a virtual headlamp which we had to supply a waterproof seal for. We poured the cement successfully in a very nervous day of work, finishing it as fast as we could owing to the temperature complicating matters – being around 100 degrees. Finally, it was finished!

We ground for a few days with electric grinders, finishing things inside and out of the cement edifice, smoothing it and insuring room above for the pavers which would sit on top of the completed concrete including the edges. It was quite the deal. All the hard work paid off handsomely.

There was also the origin and placement of the recirculating pump to consider, down on the bottom. Needless to say, along with the head lamp I mentioned, a pipe for the water – in this case a big old 4″ pipe – required its own leak proofed inserting into the form to supply the cascade. It looked something like this:

In the end, speaking with Bo, the notion of a clear electric blue color took on more and more resonance for us both and we decided to use that color with our marine enamel application. Here is a look back:

And here is a look from the side: (Note the trough at the front edge. Very subtle, this collects all the water spilling over the Infinity Edge and focuses its flow into a more naturalistic waterfall which cascades down to what results as a very secluded patio. The dark stains in the dirt are from Bo running his irrigation for too long. The buried drip irrigation is the culprit. After his first month’s water bill came in, he ratcheted it down some. He was producing swamp-like conditions in a desert!

We also applied mulch as time went on, removing the rather unsightly appearance and the reminder of such rocky soil. The rocks alongside the stairway were also reset deeper and a bit more ‘organically’ – they were freshly-supplied at the time of this picture.

From the bottom, looking up:

And here, from the top, looking down, we now see the lake next door, water-to-water, as it were.:

Needless to say, the blue color was an excellent choice. The sky looks terrific reflected in it and – at night – the cool electric blue which is as bright as it can be with a strong lamp using an additional blue filter – looks positively electric and fascinating in general.

Bo was pleased as were we.