The Patio – What Is Possible?

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Steve

This post was originally entered a year or ago. Since then I have visited a few places recently with owners wondering what to do with patios. It has inspired me to post this again, but with yet a few more example patios added. The constructions of these vary from stamped concrete to interlocking brick pavers to natural stone slabs. But the one thing I have prided myself on was in making each and every one of them appealing as possible to all of our senses.

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Patios are places to relax and enjoy the warmer air. We entertain there and we invite others to share our environments with food and drink and nice sights. I have a strong bias – and always have – towards using brick pavers and stamped concrete in my patios. I also love stone but I always found the durability issue led me away from using the native stones, at least set in sand. Bricks and cement rarely break down. I overbuild the bases of these things, beyond doubt, but the results have been universally stable which, to me, means much.

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There is also this – I prefer that the design of the patio be as pleasing as possible, by all means. But at the same time, I also prefer to know that the developments around the edges and background be equally important – if not far more so. Elements of night lighting, visible features such as waterfalls, gorgeous blooming plants, the many and various points of interest a landscaper and the gardener can provide occupy every bit as much priority in design for me.

In some ways, I guess I’m paranoid about eventually losing integrity of the bases of my constructions more than anything. Add that I have done so many driveways and fire lanes in large commercial projects and you get someone who values stability over just about anything. I suppose it is my own particular training and that experience of watching things over time more than anything that lends to biases towards surfaces. Issues of drainage, compaction, underlying strength are huge for me. But I also enjoy the notion that spills and accidents which regularly occur can be dealt with merely by replacing the bricks themselves instead of reinventing the wheel trying to find matching natural stone pieces, then worrying about their fits when dealing with some fairly obscene accidents and discolorations. In the end, no doubt, I have become a brick guy, with a definite nod towards poured stamped concrete. With all the new patterns, colors and textures, it just seems like the best product.

I feature this patio below elsewhere and it is otherwise not particularly noteworthy in terms of creativity, but it illustrates well my sense of how I prefer putting them together and my sense, upon leaving, that this place will stay very much the way it began – with ample range for improvement and augmentation around the edges. I really do believe a surface is just the start.

In a patio such as this there was very little sloping tolerance allowing for drainage. It is also plain huge. The homeowner himself installed much of the piping (and we had to make a few “adjustments”) owing to such a small slope. We also figured out the best possible way of dealing with keeping the water from the occasional torrential downpour and Reno’s snowfalls away from the house, away from the pool and devise a way to make all that go away.

We arrived at the “Channel Drain”, coursing across the patio, as the ideal solution. Complexities such as this are why brick pavers are such a delight to work with as well. They lend themselves to such tricks by being segmented and adjustable at the onset. The remainder of the project, on the back sides, could simply be diverted into beds and away from both pool and house.

Nor are bricks the only cement solution. Large slabs can be artfully arranged as well, even split such as the ones below and filled in with Thyme and aromatic herbs whose smells light up when crushed by foot traffic and who don’t even mind.

Who wouldn’t enjoy a foot-massaging surface such as the pathway construction from Portland’s Chinese Garden below? Detailed and fascinating stone – or pebble – work such as this one show what is possible if one has the time and inclination for the installation. I actually did run across a few where homeowners have done something similar to this. They were an entire Summer’s work and they were amazing.

Imagine an entire patio of these:

Small, intimate places beg for sharp-looking and fascinating surfaces. Larger ones tend to relate to a theme which struggles to see the relevance of a surface dominating the view or even the local scenery.

Since so many of my constructions have tended towards the “large”, I guess it should be understandable I would prefer some heavyweight base for the patio, driveway and sidewalk surfaces to lay on.

😉 Some of these are lots of work, too!

Like Forrest Gump said. “I’m tired now. I think I’ll quit.”

Making A Somewhat Formal Waterfall

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Steve

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.

Designing Garden Pathways – Natural Stone

Posted on August 8, 2010 by Steve

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 addictions 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”.

Rock & Boulder Month – Fractured Basalt

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Steve

“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.