I have said many times how satisfying it can be, working with large boulders and rocks. These days, tools include such things as the Mini-Excavator shown in action below, which can nearly literally do the work of 4-5 guys – and without breaking anyone’s back. This technology now includes a “thumb” which can grasp a large rock between the bucket and the ‘clamp”, allowing a near-jeweler’s precision in placement. These are especially useful in creating water features as they allow on to lightly place large stones directly in top of the EPDM liners.

I see quite a few searches from people interested in this topic, some linking here and being directed to earlier posts. I like to think I can produce even more variations and maybe some pertinent “how-to” information on working with these elements of landscape design.

Rock Walls

Dry-stacked rock walls are an art. My own artistic fortunes in these constructions have more often than not depended on who was working for me at the time. Some are just plain better than  others at the craft and some, frankly, are also better than me. Just the same, I always loved working with them. Here’s one now:

(click any image to enlarge)

These walls accentuate the lines of all those long, tall Ponderosa Pines reaching skyward. They provide ground level interest and work well against the grass. They also provide an excellent spot to add color and form to a lower dimension of the landscape.

The next one was almost bizarre but it actually grew on me. Asked initially to use two different kinds of rocks to make retaining walls and to retain a steep bank with them, we mixed them up in what later proved to be an interesting way, I thought. This is a somewhat terrible picture but it’s all I have left of the site. Planted up and growing, the look became special indeed. We added tons of colorful, shade-loving perennials.

These same blue/gray fractured rocks we used elsewhere but in more congruent forms. This one was per request with a similar mix of two sorts of basalt chips.

It’s difficult using two different colors and styles of boulders and wall blocks, yet, it happens. Here, below, is another landscape we did in much the same way. This time we decided to try and salvage the narrower rocks which were slated to be thrown away.  What was originally supposed to be all boulders took on an interesting look.

What became this:

Began as something else entirely. In fact, let’s take a time lapse look at this one:

We began with this. It aint pretty:

A really steep little bank which had a definite line at the bottom where the paver patio had been engineered to stop. It meant some pretty thick rock placements to divert water and to help the plants retain the bank itself. Also, there was a spa to put in, pretty much dead center to the operation.

We began in the spa first, having salvaged the rocks I mentioned and having also decided to build a wall with them, including a drainage system for the wall:

Then the rock work began. It was pretty much just a machine at this time. Density was asked for and we built everything bearing in mind the plants which were coming would be our eventual best friends:

I love that machine!

For the small walls we used the salvaged flatter rock material for can be seen better in this picture at the far end. We were pretty shameless in using them, actually, because I thought they looked real good. Needless to say, they functioned perfectly too. They make a nice, sturdy little edifice.

We built up the spa’s walls, then bent around the corner, sort of pasting rocks into place on our way out. We then addressed the brick paver patio, then added the spa.

We took a small “break” after dressing up the bank in our “Rockery” style. There was the small matter of installing a patio below it all – thus the increased incline of the bank itself and the care lavished on retaining the slope. In order to fit a good sized patio inside the yard, the bank needed to increase in slope.

This is what we ended up with, panorama-style:

And here it is all planted up:

Carried away once again with the good ole construction process, this was quite an excellent and very satisfying project.

What is the role of what we call Landscaping?

It’s an intriguing question and one that gets bandied about now and then by observers and those involved in the field itself. Guys like me. In the end, there are only a few perspectives available in the most general sense. One argument seems to admit the role of “Beautification” as the penultimate goal, seemingly assuming that there are cultural and intellectual advantages in “Beauty”. While I can’t argue that, I am one who believes there is a far more universal impact even yet to landscaping. I just feel assigning Landscaping to a cosmetic existence, while somewhat accurate, honestly misses the larger point.

When we take in the larger effects of landscaping – such as dealing with Urban Planning, for example – we cross a threshold into judgments as to whether the cities we live in are toxic in any form or fashion. When we then analyze what this toxicity really means, we find that many cities began and unfolded almost completely unplanned. What happened was that the rush to Industrialization begat more crowded cities as people desired to live near where they worked. Naturally, transportation was always an issue as well, from the days of the individual horse, the buggy, the trolley and to the currently very ubiquitous car.

Of course sometimes we hearken for those Olden Days  ;-) even amidst modern ones………

In the late 1800′s, urban planning began taking flight in the US as towns and cities began realizing what a complete cluster they had inherited. Entire city plans were then bid, submitted and enacted, impacting hugely cities like Louisville, Montreal, Baltimore and many others.

Suddenly, sensible plans began emerging on how to get humans from one point to another, because the plans included such provisions. Also, the development of the City Park became seen as absolutely necessary. Why?

Isn’t that “just landscaping”?

It turns out, certain general criterion began appearing as absolutes in the “livability” of cities.  A useful guide in this enterprise is Kevin Lynch’s A Theory of Good City Form (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1981). Lynch offers five basic dimensions of city performance: vitality, sense, fit, access, and control. To these he adds two “meta-criteria,” efficiency and justice.

As Cliff Ellis opines here:

“For Lynch, a vital city successfully fulfils the biological needs of its inhabitants, and provides a safe environment for their activities. A sensible city is organized so that its residents can perceive and understand the city’s form and function. A city with good fit provides the buildings, spaces, and networks required for its residents to pursue their projects successfully. An accessible city allows people of all ages and background to gain the activities, resources, services, and information that they need. A city with good control is arranged so that its citizens have a say in the management of the spaces in which they work and reside.”

Pretty dry stuff, but it applies.

The Future

The picture below also dealt with something to add to the 5th largest city in Japan – Sapporo. What designer Isamu Noguchi was asked to do was to produce a vision, reclaiming what was once the garbage landfill on the finished site shown below, which is now the world-famous Moerenuma Park. It was one of his final projects and a very noteworthy one.

Noguchi called this park a “lung”. The presence of air-cleaning and ion-producing carbon-based plantings cause not just an innate sense of space and beauty, they also tend to act to make us plain healthier, both mentally and physically. It seems we crave such things, dating undoubtedly from our origins as land walkers, nomads and hunters. We surely crave them with a near-visceral sense of attachment. Speak with any older group of baseball fans from Brooklyn or Boston and among the first things you’ll hear is how luscious the fields looked at ball games. The grass was literally nearly and end in itself.

Here, in this futuristic park, the contrived features resemble ancestral images, while at the same time – at least here – promoting a futuristic sense of possibility. The clean lines of this pyramid remind us of what is timeless in design and most attractive in dimension. The smells alone would make it pretty.

Recently, Huaxi, China held a confab inviting the world’s best young architects to devise individual buildings which could comprise the new elements of the already-celebrated city. From the event: “The site of Huaxi is famous for its dramatic and beautiful landscape, as well as a diverse mix of minority cultural inhabitants during its history. Its future is defined by the local government’s urban planning as a new urban centre for finance, cultural activities and tourism. MAD brought the young architects together here in the summer of 2008, for a 3-day workshop to create an experimental urban vision for Huaxi.”

What they came up with was wild:

Their question: “Are we going to continue copying the skyline of Western cities created over a hundred years of industrial civilisation? Will Manhattan and Chicago continue to be our model city, even after 15 years of urban construction in China? Is there an alternative future for our cities that lies in the current social condition, where new technologies leave the machine age behind, and where the city increasingly invades the natural space? Based on an Eastern understanding of nature, this joint urban experiment aims to explore whether we can use new technologies and global ideas to reconnect the natural and man-made world.”

Let’s face it – it;s not as if efforts to get to exactly this end have not proceeded apace. Frank Gehry’s designs for buildings and grounds show exactly the same non-conforming principles as those wildly “impractical” designs from the MAD Group of Huaxi.

Except for this -

Frank Gehry’s actually already exist!

Do they ever!

Also from the Huaxi Group’s statements: “In the past 15 years, around 10 billion sqm of built space has been created in the urban areas of China. In 20 years time, another 200 to 400 new cities will be built. Until now, the results of this overwhelming urbanization have been defined by high-density, high-speed and low-quality duplication: the urban space is meaningless, crowded and soulless.”

“The city is no longer determined by the leftover logic of the industrial revolution (speed, profit, efficiency) but instead follows the ‘fragile rules’ of nature.”

Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles:

An apartment complex by Gehry:

The paradigm seems to be shifting yet again and this time the most fervent hope is to provide alternatives to the prior style of efficient function, elevating us all into an appreciation for Nature’s intrinsic delicate nature, embodied by – of all things – the buildings around us and their grounds. Nature is also accidental, cruel, aristocratic and occasionally homely. It’s just the way it is. Integrating Truth into everyday passages asks us to provide a Nature which is every bit as inspiring and dominating as nature herself.

OK, this is a stretch for a simple landscaping blog. Just know this: I know that and let me say my piece.  It’s never stopped me before, has it? This one deals with the Earth, having said that, and that’s my own area. Dirt rocks and so do rocks.

I recently went to the movies, chucked on my 3D glasses and watched one of the most stunning movie events I have ever seen. The film is called “The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams” and I cannot possibly recommend it high enough. It was directed by Werner Herzog and deals with an inside look at the astonishing Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, where artists as long ago as 32,000 years plied their art of cave-paintings, using the walls of this gorgeous, previously-hidden cave as their canvas and using the folds and 3 dimensional aspect of the terrain itself to provide depth, apparent motion and breathtaking artistic ability.

The extremely cautious French Government goes overboard in scrupulous preservation paranoia, and the film mentions this. Protecting the inside treasure is testified to when references to them shutting the cave off to visitors for a few months was felt necessary owing to “The breath of visitors is causing a mold to adhere to the walls.” This is a look inside – a rare moment in time and one which may or may not ever be replicated.

The cave simply reveals life at that time in a manner which nothing else possibly could. The genius is inside the art itself, of course, but the creative genius of Werner Herzog amplifies it, juxtaposing all this with modern perceptions of an era, seen from the best anthropological, psychological and paleantological minds of our generation.

Borrowing this piece of breathless excitement emitted by  a movie review in the New York Times:

“The cave was discovered in December 1994 by three French cavers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire. Following an air current coming from the cliff, they dug and crawled their way into the cave, which had been sealed tight for some 20,000 years. After finally making their way to an enormous chamber, Ms. Deschamps held up her lamp and, seeing an image of a mammoth, cried out, “They were here,” a glorious moment of discovery that closed the distance between our lost human past and our present.”

How cool is that?

The movie possesses so much depth and range of emotion and the hidden tension of discovery, that it nearly stands alone as an experience of brotherliness linking ourselves with our incredibly ancient past. I have to suspect this is an instant classic, no matter how uneven it might seem at its start. The punch is delivered as we advance, revealing all the incredible wonders this cave has to offer. Bear skulls, complete vertebrae of gigantic land animals, pictures of the rhinos, the Ibex, horses, lions, bison adorn these walls in graduated impact as the camera gets released later to fully explore.

Anyway – I guess you can tell I enjoyed the film!  ;-)

And here is where we return to the premise of this post. That Herzog has created a masterpiece I have little doubt. When you feel literally blessed and extremely fortunate to view a film, then these emotions tell us something very important: either we are nuts, or else this guy put together a magnificent piece of pure genius. I naturally choose the latter. As I said, the uneven beginning to the film requires a bit of patience. There is information coming in rather placid and somewhat pedantic ways, although there are indeed gorgeous pictures of the paintings and the access to them at the same time. The geological wonders alone are fantastic and impossible. Calcite galore, stalactites and stalagmites adorn the view – some literally impacting the paintings as well as such things as footprints of a bear as well as that of a child. The protective measures taken by the French is also droned on about at length – but – and here’s the thing:

It all makes sense and comes together incredibly effectively as we witness what a treasure this is. The drama of this discovery is served well by Herzog and the ineffable music streaming from the cello of the master cellist, Ernst Reijseger, which takes on an increasing urgency and even pathos as we discover this enormously ancient past of all of ours. The musical work of Reijseger is of a quality I have rarely seen before – it is clearly evocative and it seems utterly spontaneous as it impacts us concurrently with the images we behold and the verbalized statements from the long list of exceptional people. It courses through the film in a sensuous, even mysteriously sinewy way – somehow absolutely perfectly emotive and even responsible as we peer into who we once were. It is somehow totally fitting that we should answer the very height of their art with some of our own.

There is humanity here and a respect for our past. I mean a deep respect for our past. Oddities galore – it appears Neanderthal man was around as well as our own Homo Sapiens species evolved in the same neighborhood. Entire skeletons of the animals of the day appear, close up and personal.

I’m including aspect of Herzog and Reijseger’s traveling “Cine-Concert” which is entitled “Requiem For A Dying Planet” which toured to rave reviews globally. The reason I include this apparently non-related and somewhat disjointed piece is merely to illustrate the level of artistic genius this group operates at. Obviously, their goals are as high in terms of the stewardship of our planet – a message it would seem we could use ample measure of. I give you the “Requiem”:

Which do I prefer? Renovating an existing place or working with new homes, set on earth and nothing else? In landscaping, it’s almost a tossup.

Going in and facing this totally blank tableau of dust and flat or steeply-angled dirt has much appeal. So much appeals immediately – images form based on one’s experience and garden design logic based on the past. The very idea of wrestling something civilized and becoming out of simple bare earth has a rare fascination.

(enlarge all pictures by left-clicking the image)

I have always depicted landscaping itself as an “Ultimate Cosmetic”. There are very few trades indeed who literally “finish” the expanses we deal with on a daily basis. I was told by the owner of this home, below, to “do what I wanted”. It was 10 acres.    Sure enough, we did and he paid happily for the service.

We began, more or less, right here:

And we ended up with these two views – for a microcosmic look at progress:

Panning out – we have this oft-cited photo from here: (big job on lots and lots and lots of dust)

And yet, we also have undertaken projects such as the one below by crashing our way back into the thickets of forestation and undergrowth, rendering it something else entirely.

What you see on the periphery of this pond and patio was what was at the exact spot that pond now lies. To even call this a renovation is almost funny because it involved such epic change and deconstruction first.

Other types of renovations include the epic “Get my broken cement outta here!” Such as this one:

Ending with this and a far happier client:

And on and on it goes………. Truth is, they all have many moments of pure constructive joy, along with injury and accidental failures and successes. Landscaping itself is creating something from either nothing or recreating Nature with our own intervention.

Face it. It can get pretty wild going from this:

To this: