Steve Snedeker’s Landscaping and Gardening Blog

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”.

I’ll no doubt place these sporadically because the meat of this blog is landscaping and not all of these figures – in fact only one – is a landscaper. But I also believe we can do things such as this not only as exercises to explain ourselves to others, but to actually honor that which they accomplished. There is always merit in praising those who deserve it. It gives them a wider audience and writing about their influence on myself  supplies information about what they mean to the world – even if it merely my small corner.

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There is no personal rating system which quantifies these values. Just the fact that I simply know what effect their products and work have had on my life. But let me begin with one who talks about a value and a process without which I would not be able to do this blog. I am, if nothing else, about working. The tasks of landscaping – among the many in this kaleidoscopic field – involved serious quantities of dead lifting. I once tried to figure out the total weight of an average day’s efforts, where I moved one heavy thing to another location and I believe I came up with somewhere around five tons. Now, earlier when I was younger, this would have all been moved by hand – moved by wheelbarrow or shovel and rake. Later, of course, I did less, although, because I got smarter and began finding budgets and tools to support machines for the work I had once labored over, I bet the tonnage moves up substantially. Well, anyway, it does not have to be as hard or as onerous as it seems. In spite of how brutal it felt at the times – Lord, how many of those??? – I made out OK, after all. But in the end I thoroughly enjoyed it and I got some spiritual fulfillment from a guy who has always been all over work about the “value of work” – Eric Hoffer.

Eric Hoffer posed himself as The Everyman, although, the truth is he considered himself far more aligned with the stragglers and the “underclass”. He believed that work and the development of a trade which one does well is a rite of passage for young men and that the affluence of the post war period of the 50′s and 60′s contributed to a longer “adolescence”, in that this development was often avoided – sometimes through the advice of parents: “If you don’t get your degree, you’ll be in Viet Nam or longshoring or digging ditches!” He thus earned the title of “conservative” from academics – whom he also criticized for being very desirous of power but who also bit the hands that fed them.  When called an intellectual, he insisted that he was a longshoreman. Hoffer has been dubbed by some authors as “longshoreman philosopher.” Academics had a hard time with Hoffer.

As a kid of 5, in 1907, in New York City, his mother fell while holding him, down a flight of stairs. She died two years later from complications of that fall and Eric lost his sight at the age of 7. He also lost much of his memory as well. It was 8 years later when his sight miraculously returned and one of the prominent desires he had always had came to fruition – he read books like crazy. He remained a voracious reader his entire life.

He moved at the age of 20 to Los Angleles where he figured a poor man could live in such weather. He lived on the street and sold oranges door-to-door until he realized he was a natural salesman and he could make good money. Uncomfortable with that idea, he quit. He was in something of a downward spiral and he attempted suicide and failed but it “scared him straight”. The experience gave him a new determination to live adventurously. It was then he left skid row and became a  migrant worker, and then, after that 5 year phase he took on various odd jobs, finally moving  to San Fransisco in 1941. He tried joining the war effort but was rejected because of a hernia so he did what he thought would help most by becoming a longshoreman at the docks. He settled down and stayed for the remainder of his life, working at the docks until he was 65. He began writing then and even ended up with a column as time went by.

Hoffer’s first book caused quite a sensation: “The Ordeal of Change”.  In a nutshell, Hoffer addresses one of his most fascinating themes, mass movements and mass psychology. I happen to like this stuff as well, but Hoffer always and forever included the working man in his diatribes. Indeed, it is the premise from which this all flows. The most central theme of all, for Hoffer is self-esteem.

Self Esteem

Hoffer focused on the consequences of a lack of self-esteem. He assumed self-esteem is granted by labor and by accomplishment in the real world. But he saw other puzzles of a grander sort when he stopped to analyze the totalitarian movements that caused World War 2.  He postulated that fanaticism and self-righteousness are rooted in self-hatred, self-doubt, and insecurity. As he describes in True Believer, he believed a passionate obsession with the outside world or with the private lives of other people is merely a craven attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one’s own life. In this simple assumption is where my own considerations merge with his. Granted that’s a simple bit of logic, yet it tells us much in just that simplicity.

Hoffer always contended that the world was “changing too fast”. To quote Wikipedia’s succinct passage explaining this:

“In Hoffer’s view, rapid change is not a positive thing for a society, and too rapid change can cause a regression in maturity for those who were brought up in a very different society than what that society has become. He noted that in 1960s America, many young adults were still living in extended adolescence. Seeking to explain the attraction of the New Left protest movements, he characterized them as the result of widespread affluence, which, in his words, “is robbing a modern society of whatever it has left of puberty rites to routinize the attainment of manhood.”

Furthermore:

“Hoffer further notes that the reason working-class Americans did not by and large join in the 1960s protest movements and subcultures was they had entry into meaningful labor as an effective rite of passage out of adolescence, while both the very poor who lived on welfare and the affluent were, in his words “prevented from having a share in the world’s work and of proving their manhood by doing a man’s work and getting a man’s pay” and thus remained in a state of extended adolescence, lacking in necessary self-esteem, and prone to joining mass movements as a form of compensation.”

Make no mistake, the actual issues of The Movement during that time were relevant. Women’ Rights, racial equality, corporate accountability, an unproductive war sending 400 kids a week home in bags were all compelling as they could possibly be. They burst through and are as relevant even now. Those times saw the intersection of an incredible number of changing things. Bear in mind as well that that generation were raised with the specter of Nuclear War as real as anything we can imagine. I know my dreams were full of fearsome mushroom clouds and unearthly destruction, too.

For Me

I am a fan. He is the working man’s common sense philosopher who butted his head against the Freudians and the academics of his day, extremely unfashionable yet amazingly penetrating. Hoffer’s lack of a formal college education contributed to his independent thought, and his books remain as insightful and just as classic today.

I recall first reading him and reveling in how much plain common sense it all made. Eric Hoffer hit me like a ton of bricks right when I was most ready for him, I believe. I just felt fortunate to have run across a man who valued work in an era when it actually seemed – and does, still seem – to not matter in people’s assessment of what it takes to be happy. His commentary on the mass movements of modern politics should be primary reading for anyone who wonders how these movements form and how the develop more.

It’s all a puzzle but it also explains my views of life and work. It has much to do with this blog inasmuch as I am working here, too. Since I am working, and since I get some self-esteem from this project, I feel it’s natural to explain why. I do promise this will be a rather final statement about self-esteem. I like it – we all like it – it works to make a body feel good. Everything else is as it should be, I reckon.

After all, we like looking into things.

Making stuff is fun in the end.

“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.