Turning a corner with stone slabs

The garden structure to be accessed by a set of rough slab steps

Necessity is said to be the mother of invention. Our perceptions of need spur the action that finally gets things moving and, one day, done. Here it was a matter of finishing up a set of rough slab steps begun, but left incomplete, by a landscaper rushing to finish other pieces of a complex job with his excavator. He was focussed on completing the stone retaining structures pictured above - the steps were simply an add-on from his perspective, so rudimentary work sufficed. Their original purpose was to allow people to safely climb a steep slope up to the garden gallery or terrace, comprising a secondary access to a level directly connected to the house by its own pathway from above. It fell to me, a gardener who dabbles in stone work, to fill in the gaps and complete the flight of steps. While finding a fix wasn't nearly the top priority in that baffling new landscape, it was an important one for security in access. So unaccountably one very hot day I found myself taking the plunge.

The corner to be turned: first of the new stones placed

I'd been fiddling with step-making in other locations around the house, figuring out how to make them ascend far gentler inclines than this one. Here a much sharper rise was involved, with the final flight of steps (about a third) simply left as slope. While someone could clamber up or down to paths from where the slabs ended, the shale slope they rested against was loose at the surface - clearly it would only be a matter of time until someone lost their footing on it. And as we are older folk with a social realm of increasingly older folks, it was important to act on this access, and that meant figuring out a way to turn a corner to bring the steps in level with the gallery above them. Not rocket science, but if you haven't done it before, a challenging enough puzzle. Fortunately I was guided by the need for utility first and foremost, so was prepared to be flexible in finding a fix. What mattered most was here security, refinement of aesthetics was secondary. And these were quite rough working conditions, and the work done in the excruciating heat of August on a south-facing slope.

A significant rise on a shale slope, showing the corner needing to be turned

Second stone placed, illustrating the switchback needed to reach the landing

I had certainly chosen an unpromising time to start this sort of work: high summer, during a prolonged drought in the intense sunlight, in a location that concentrates heat. A few hours in that exposure would see me woozy, even with a hat and sunglasses and lots of water. I found myself going through work tee-shirts non-stop. But as I've discovered over a lifetime of gardening, the best time to tackle any task is whenever you can find the time to do it. Fact is, I'd been shying away from this job, as I was a uncertain how I'd move some biggish chunks of stone down the long incline to the job site. The slabs already in place were gargantuan, placed by excavator. I couldn't match these for scale with the stones I'd be moving there by hand (and there was now no possibility of using a machine without degrading the settled part of the landscape). Also material of their size simply wouldn't do for the remaining part of the climb.To complete the job with any consistency, I would need to move smaller but substantial pieces of stone into position, without benefit of a machine.

Enter the new rock dolly, above. Figuring I might need to shift pieces as heavy as a hundred pounds or more, I'd finally sourced a dolly or truck built  to take that and far heavier weights. With this device in hand,  there was no longer an excuse not to begin the job. So one hot Saturday, in impromptu fashion, I began the job. First I scoured my rock piles for candidate chunks. I'm not a trained stone worker, and my hands and wrists won't take a lot of concussive action, so I needed chunks that were ready to go and could function immediately as as steps - flat, thick, but not too deep. And, capable of forming a turning alignment, a switch-back of fairly sharp degree.

Jockeying a candidate slab into position to function as a step

The corner to be turned was essentially a full ninety degrees, on a sharper than ideal gradient, and tucked around a gigantic corner stone. Turning the steps would allow the path to access a landing at level, thus taming some of the sharpness of the rise. I calculated roughly four eight-inch steps (not an ideal rising height, but still climable) needed adding to the existing slabs. What follows is a photo-story of the choosing and placing of these steps.

To state the obvious, you begin by adding to the last completed step. You build upwards, so each step rests on or is tucked in behind the previous one. So this entailed excavating a pocket in which the first stone would sit. After a lot of inspecting of possibilities, I trundled a candidate stone down to the site, measured it in situ and then transferred its shape roughly to a pocket excavated in the shale. 

Third step placed into the run up to the landing

Four steps added in all, to make ascent safer

The next shot shows the abutments evolving and a threshold stone set in place for orientation towards the landing. This process will go on for a while, indeed there's still an evolution of the edges of the steps. I've been exploring the addition of tumbled granites, random chunks of granitic rock smoothed off by glacial action. I don't feel that I'm at the end of that piece just yet, adjustment is ongoing. I feel the need to continue reworking the slope side of the path, as the retention there feels a bit awkward still.



 

Here are a couple of shots of how it's looking these days, as vegetation and rock collections evolve.

Finding Form (2)

October 2017 A couple of sunny afternoons have gone into the pad since I last posted. It may not be obvious from the pictures, but some more initial layout has happened, and I've started refining that first layout en route to mortaring in. Refining essentially means tightening things up, making sure the edges of adjacent stones echo each other, and swapping out any problem pieces. I feel blessed to have had weather warm enough to work in shorts and a tee, despite it being well into fall and cold enough to have lit a fire the night before. Leaves are falling abundantly now, maples in this case. Apple harvesting continues apace across the Penders, now tapering off into the later varieties. But I'm focussed here on pad at the back of our place, engulfed in a fabulous ambience for a day of laying out stone.

Tightening a layout is finicky work, often involving carefully removing knobs of stone to realize a more sympathetic shape. I use an old election sign from my municipal politics days as a kneeling pad, so I can keep close to the material without discomfort. I remove any pieces I need to modify to a makeshift banker (just loose gravel dust heaped up) so there's some cushioning of my chisel's impacts, which helps to avoid unwanted breaks along hidden faults. This being sandstone, it's easy enough to break a solid piece into bits inadvertently, and then be faced with having to fill in an irregular void. The next shot shows a section after some snugging up of the material. Note the slight wandering movement introduced into the pad's edge to take it off rigid square.

 

 This layout has been tightened up and the garden edge's gently curving alignment emphasized

What a skookum place to do stonework, smack dab in the scenery, with fall light and an overall ambience of forest edge. It's just a neat place to be engaged in doing this sort of work. Patience is required because the material is stone, a resistant medium that can be challenging to coax into the relationships you want. I was particularly concerned here to keep that crosswise flow going, so redid some sections on the right side of pad that were a bit notional. The left hand edge was good from the start, because I laid it out as a piece.


 

The left edge wanders agreeably, capturing a bit of motion, but the overall flow is crosswise

I kept myself at it for a good five hours, which afforded a sense of progress, albeit modest because this is slow work. It was great to get a little time with it in later afternoon too, after a nice warm tub to ease the aches from bending so much, at a time when the light was especially mellow with autumnal tints. It's satisfying as the maker to be able to note the signs of progress. I'm starting to feel a sense of expectation around this project, getting more committed to seeing it through, more keen about my next chance to advance it. It's a bit of a crap-shoot there, because my time comes in weekend-long increments and only now and then. Weather can readily confound you at this time of year, turning foul just when you finally have time for the work. But this particular weekend, near the end of October, the weather remained superb.

Looking very good in late afternoon fall sunshine after a day of tweaking the layout

I mentioned working in the fall light, with its golden quality, a facet that's manifest in the yellow leaves of big leaf maple.

Back at the time I noticed and began retrieving off-cuts for future paving, I did a quick layout on the a sheet of plywood to get a sense of what this jumble of bits might look like worked into a unity. I was immediately convinced it was worth the effort to retrieve the material and that something worthy could be made of it.

A quick and dirty arrangement just to get a sense of how the material might work as a whole

Later on, I took it a step further, beginning a layout on the notorious pad, again to see what it might look like. This in situ attempt sensitized me to the potential for a directional flow across the pad.

It was fun playing around in an uncommitted way with my stone trove

It was around this time that we were drawing the conclusion that our old cottage in fact needed a substantial rebuild. The premise for setting the stone out (embellishing what was already in place) had been overtaken by the much larger choice to put a proper foundation under the existing structure. The layout above and below was done quite casually, really more for practice and to see how quantities would play out. It allowed me to draw some useful conclusions (start at the edges and work across, not inside and working outwards). Nonetheless, I enjoyed the look, and it did help me draw some conclusions for the next attempt, some while after the construction and landscaping work were finally done. I didn't realize then it would be years before I finally got around to tackling it in earnest. 

Vertical and horizontal placements promiscuously arranged in a crazy paving way

The stone had to be repiled and placed out of harm's way for the duration of the construction, and the subsequent landscaping using rock retaining walls. It was an intrusive process, as the picture below indicates. Now it's time at long last to bring that back patio into full service. Did I mention I'm getting excited?

Construction creates chaos first, then draws order out of it

 






























 

Finding Form

The work site with preliminary shoring up of the edge, surfacing stacked on a pallet

September 2017: A heap of surfacing stone stored on a pallet for years awaited the day the mason would finally get round to the task. Eventually, he did. The original idea was to use the flat pieces, three quarters to an inch and a half thick, to resurface an angular concrete patio pad to dress it more presentably. Abruptly defined edges would be softened, sketchy retaining stabilized and thickened for better support, finished sides of weathered bedrock would help it fit in. My overriding interest was to discern how to link the pad to its surroundings by making it seem to actually rise from bedrock, rather than just plunked down there. To be kind, the slab was both visually intrusive and perched carelessly on hastily made prism of rock waste, construction debris and soil (see next pic). The design was all utility, zero beauty - and even the utility was sketchy. 

Over a winter I put energy into shoring up the pad's edges while trying to create a toe for the rather steep bedrock diving beneath it. All the while I was considering how best to obtain a more natural integration of structure with the rock outcrops beneath it. The plan was for the pad to accommodate circumnavigation of the building, as well as access from a new back door to the cottage. Due to its height, this meant it would need to be fitted with steps-up from adjacent walkways. The pad originally was a sort of promontory rather detached from its immediate surroundings, sitting higher than you would have made it if your goal had been to fit it into its context. Whoever built it was happily oblivious of these considerations, so his un-ideal placement is now just our datum, from which we are working to conjure the missing sense of integration. Building up the sides with paths and steps incised as naturally as possible is necessary to realize the pad's full potential. Check out the original crudeness of its edges and eroding base in the photo below, taken in January 2014. Working up shoring at the base of a slope is challenging, because there really wasn't a bench to work from. Much of this shoring would be covered in when rock retaining walls were placed along the west edge, in 2015.

The pad was originally placed on a relatively loose heap of rock, building waste and soil

A lot of time went into building a pad supporting toe of slope

All of which got covered over when the landscape was retained to create an edge for the house

Shoring up the edges and just beginning to consider how steps might run up to the pad

My surfacing stone was assembled from off-cuts and left-overs cadged from my brother-in-law's nearby patio project, some of it headed for road base when I rescued it. There were also some larger intact pieces that were unused which my generous BIL gifted me, and I've added a few chunks of local sandstone that are consistent with the colour mix. I think I will have enough for the surfacing job, though probably just barely - a challenge will be not winding up with a collection of least attractive pieces around the last portion done. Most of it is some sort of slate material, in attractive blues, greys and greens, with a few orangy streaks to animate the mix. As you'll see there's considerable irregularity to the pieces, so turning them into a unity is like sorting out a jigsaw puzzle in stone. In English garden parlance this is known as 'crazy paving', in Japanese tradition it's known as 'stone carpet'.  

Crazy paving in English terms, stone carpet in Japanese garden design

I have taken forever to get going on this job, as my attention has been focused elsewhere on building a linked series of paths and patios around the house. A lot of preliminary work went into securing and sealing the material the pad sits on, and beginning to elaborate a set of steps connecting to a finished pathway. I'm the kind of stoner who likes to see what he's making before he commits to mortaring it together, so there's been lots of layout going on and not much mortaring. I guess I needed to see how the sides of the pad could be evolved before tackling resurfacing. But recently I resolved it was time to get moving, and then finally a solo weekend with more temperate fall weather came along and brought the right mood, so I finally began tackling the beast.

Looking westwards across the pad, very beginnings of an edge treatment on the north side

I began by roughly sorting my heap of stored materials into a half dozen groupings based on shape and size, and whether they did or didn't need trimming. This was a practical necessity and it allowed me to see enough clear space to begin a layout. I wanted to be able start at the west end, furthest from the house, and I wanted to introduce some modest movement into the outside edge to steer it off the straight lines currently modelled. The general idea was to let my imagination play with the stone, following a precept of achieving a sense of flow across the pad that would reflect the actual path of energy moving over it. Here, above a bay sitting across from Saltspring Island, the wind often blows out of the southwest, the channel's waves tend to roll into the bay in the same plane (ferry wash included), and sunlight also traces a similar path as it crosses the sky. Reflecting this movement of energy in the placing of stones means keeping them more horizontal than vertical across the patio. The next pic shows the very beginning of hinting at the lines of force in layout.

Stone roughly sorted, notional layout beginning, feeling buoyant about possibilities

So this is where it all started in earnest, in early September. It's a finicky process to achieve good results, so it's bound to go on for a good while now.