My best friend Steve settles in, hard by the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland, Oregon, during their wonderful visit there a couple years back. The Keller Fountain offers a full body experience which can be especially refreshing on hot Summer days. Fountains such as this were designed to enjoy up close and personal, a wonderful civic experience amid the workaday world and the hubub therein.

Public edifices are like smiles – no one forces you use them. They are a response to an urge to appreciate ourselves and therefore make absolutely no real rational or intellectual sense. Like anything which is beautiful, the wonder is implicit as we adore what we see. I believe beauty lights us up inside by its contagious nature. I think that’s why God invented beautiful men and women. I mean, you can have too much mud, let’s face it.

Below, we catch a stunning work of man in this constructed waterfall and a couple of huge lakes on the Papa John’s Pizza campus in Louisville. It’s a wonderful place to walk, with a landscape just completely enriching to experience. The scale is pretty much off the charts – an installer’s Paradise, with tiny little projects abounding.

Catching the corporate Paradise urge, enlivening our outdoors with splendid works of architectural and constructed resemblances of Nature Herself, we go to Seattle and visit the amazing waterfall built by my friends at Teufel Nurseries for the Microsoft Campus. This one needs to be seen to fully appreciate.

I’m a huge urban fountain fan. I love seeing a bustling population all buzzing around these “human flypaper” structures. Humans are plain drawn to water – it’s a trait we probably manifested back when we were fish – (I’ll ask a couple of my older friends to verify) – our children seem to believe water is magical, even when contaminated with mud. It’s just that cool!

So what we get with these designs are not just the wonder of water itself, acting on us in all of water’s ineffably strange and subtle manners, but we also get to grade the structures made to support it all. This one below generally gets an “A”.

I guess it deserves it.

This one below – The Magic Fountain – is in Barcelona – just another of the many reasons I need to see that town. The lighting alone on this stunning public fountain is absolutely Galactic Class:

Breath-taking, really, isn’t it?

Fun-loving civic projects – both publicly and privately-funded provide more grist for the Beauty Mill. For the vast majority of us, a puddle can be a world in and of itself. When placed in the hands of ambitious designers, they take on another entire realm of Wonder, such as this Singapore Fountain, the largest in the World:

It just doesn’t stop. Fun, vibrantly colorful, aided by lighting and engineering trickery, we look at such things and laugh. Their reason to exist is so tentative, yet so enabling for us all to catch our Souls as they smile.

Here, for example, is a project we undertook just recently in Louisville, utilizing a Craiglist ad for a bunch of “old brick” someone wanted to dispose of. Needless to say the price was right, but the finished product we thought was equally satisfying.

From the back porch – nice, simple, durable and ready for the foliage surrounding it to expand and soften things nicely:

At times, simpler is just better. While strictly rectangular, a more plastic sort of design featuring gentle curves and a more rounded shape in general treat these rigid blocks as elements of more natural shapes.

But some patterns come already circular! From Pavestone, a product I have used many times, this gorgeous and simple integration of a small circle in an otherwise standard pattern:

Installers and designers have long since employed circular pattern insertions as points of interest and complexity. Brick Paver suppliers have oodles of “circular kits” with premade patterns which are easy to install.

Hardheads like me, however, occasionally go for the circular look as a second thought, opting to work like mad just to make things marginally more interesting for a client.

But the variety of styles and patterns has moved along, offering some gorgeous options in terms of coloring and shape.

The shade of this one is called “Cream and Tan”:

This rustic little design is a tumbled paver, composed of so many different sizes and shapes that we decided to use a completely random pattern in laying it.

The rougher, more rustic “tumbled” look has an implicit sort of aged quality – like an instant antique:

Among other virtues of these, more “imperfect” pavers revolve around the grouting, using different colored sands for the “infill” for the cracks between the bricks. With the overall coating of a coat of good sealer, the sand stays permanent and accents the stones with interest and a very functional role.

Pretty professional picture taking, isn’t it?  

(to enlarge any pictures, left click)

We take the approach that what we work on is permanent. The actual fact of the matter is, many of these driveways and patios will literally outlive the houses they abut. We realize this and I design and install thinking 3-4 generations of plants ahead. I fully expect the perennials in the picture above to be dug up and changed out possibly 20 times during the life of this combination driveway and patio. It’s what happens when you deal with the best products. It’s also what happens when you bother to prepare what’s under them adequately.

And we believe the same precepts apply in the walls we build.

And we cut wall blocks much the same as we cut pavers. Some blocks fit perfectly on the table of a large saw, sporting that wonderful device – the diamond saw blade – encrusted with industrial diamonds which can tear through just about anything, and particularly concrete products.

I’ve owned a pretty good number of saws in my day. The one pictured above ends up being what I found was the most useful for paver work. It is electric and, of course, as can be seen, it runs with water forced onto the cutting surface which serves to cool down the diamond blade and – most importantly – to keep the dust down. Cutting through bricks – especially cement ones – creates an enormous amount of dust. The particles cut are absolutely tiny. Modern electrical saws these days can run on far less amperage then they used to. There was a time when we would shut down breakers in a house from the stress on the electrical circuit. Now, better ball bearing technology and advances in more efficient motors has meant electrical saws can once again be considered usable and very dependable. The other very, very major advancement is in how much quieter they are than the gas powered engines which were what we used for long years prior.

Here is a floor model look at a powerful but noisy gas-powered brick saw:

Now, these cut faster, for sure. They have all the torque in the world. But they are tough for residential work, owing to their irritant factor. These will never be quiet – ever. But, for commercial work, they are clearly the state of the art. Just remember your earmuffs!

Next, we have the “art” of cutting. Those machines will all do the job. The “art”, however, is in making the perfect cut. The brick pavers it will take to make this look like a smooth consistent edge will take some real precision.

We typically work our way outwards from a house. This is primarily because near the home is where most of the traffic will eventually be and we want the largest possible pavers to service underfoot. Thus we end up looking like this on our way out to an edge.

As we close in on the outer edge, we lay as many completely intact pavers as we can. At that point, we begin cutting. I typically cultivate a two man team for this process. We have one guy marking where the pavers are to be cut and another guy on the saw. We can also waste pavers in the process of failing to get them to exacting standards. And, yes, I choose those standards. Where we do have a couple of tricks in our professional arsenal to make it look close to perfect, we also have a couple of tricks that can allow us to BE perfect.

We come to resemble this along the process:

Depending on the severity of the curve we are conforming to, straight lines can generally totally succeed at giving a curved look. And the saw only cuts straight lines. Oh, there are some artists who like shaving a bit, but that is Paver Cutting – Graduate Course. If you notice the pictures above and below, you can see how all the cuts at this project were straight ones.

Gratuitous Corey picture Alert!    Hi, Corey!

And here is the finished product:

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: