Current music:	Secret Garden Theme - Zbigniew Preisner
Entry tags:	garden stonework

Another reject-stone project for our 'secret garden'

My wife and I fancy ourselves as pretty good amateur stone masons. I’ve described some of landscaping our projects in Fremantlebiz during the past few years. To name a few there was the Chinese herb garden with an echelon of reproduction antique warriors, the Greek garden replete with reproduction Doric columns salvaged from a nearby demolition and the Roman enclave garden with stone walls and arched windolettes. These creations are all standing as good as ever and starting to take on the patina of age, which is the effect we want to achieve.

One thing we don’t do is throw out any scrap limestone. We keep every little bit in a ‘tidy’ pile because we know from our experience that we’ll possibly be able to use in in some future project, no matter how irregularly shaped it might be.

We’ve just completed a stone flower box in our Roman enclave. It’s a sad fact living in suburbia that border fences tend to pollute the vision, so the best solution is to grow stuff against them, and what better way than from a stone flower box. We did have a nice moon creeper doing quite well in the same position for a couple of years, but it went manky.

We started the flower box a couple of weeks ago. We used old bricks for the foundation. (We have a small stack of them in reserve as well.) Here’s a sequence of pics.


Construction of a stone flower box

We are always very careful to keep things plumb. A string line and spirit level are our best friends in this regard. We always find the entire process in these sort of jobs very satisfying. We hand mix the mortar in a wheelbarrow. A stone capping was laid along the top of the wall to finish the job. On Friday we filled the flower box with sand and mixed in a few bags of sheep and cow manure.

We were going to make our first planting to be three types of basil to compliment the summer salad season. We bought the basil seedlings yesterday and actually planted them. However I decided to check on the safety of food plants in the proximity of chemically treated greenish-coloured wood posts. There were a couple on the new bed supporting the old red lattice. I found a blog site called Fits and Starts with some useful information links. What I read persuaded me to replant the basil elsewhere and we’ll go for some petunias instead. We’ll buy some today. We also transplanted a stephanotis creeper yesterday from the Chinese herb garden where it had been struggling against summer heat. We’re expecting it to recover quickly in the new position.


Millie inspects the finished project

© MMIX Paul R. Weaver.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally.  An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!