On my birthday, my son Abraham and I built this small stone lantern out of leftover chips from the Thyme project. It’s lit by a single light bulb and rather short and squat. Small whimsical projects like this help me understand more about how stone works- and fails to work- and gives me ideas for larger, more permanent structures.
I visited the Thyme Project at dusk on a very rainy day. The rain and the light combined to give the stonework its richest colors.
After finishing the front yard, there was a small project around back at the Thyme House. This step up onto the back deck had caved in over the course of its short life (less than ten years.) The exposed paint edge shows how much it had settled.
Removing the step tread revealed this interesting arrangement. The riser stones are snapped square, so set well, they’re unlikely to shift, but they still seem too thin to me. The bigger problem being that there’s no back edge to support the step, or prevent the fill from trickling out. Dried leaves are not an effective backfill. Don’t look too closely or you’ll see the leathery corpse of a rat, again, not recommended backfill.
The real problem revealed itself as I dug further. The step rested on a patio that sat on twelve inches of shifting sand. Sand is great for leveling under flagging, but I don’t suggest it as a structural fill. Other parts of the flagging have been compromised by moles burrowing through the sand. Immediately behind the step, under the deck, the ground slopes away quickly, giving the sand a place to slump towards. Gravity won and the whole thing relaxed.
I neglected to photo the small underground retaining wall I built to support the flagstone patio, that then supported the new step. I decided to stack stone instead of re-using the snapped edging. I did use a couple of pieces as tie stones, reaching toward the center of the step.
The old step made new again.
I have just begun selling note cards and art prints featuring photographs of stonework. I have one set of cards available of work done by the Unturned Stone. More sets will soon follow.
Check them out at my design studio site, Papershine.
We finished the wall feature earlier this week on a cold, soggy day. It’ll be a little while before the yard recovers, but even amongst the mud, one can see how the wall and walkway trace each other through the yard. In some places they echo each other and in others they drift in their own directions, meeting again at both ends. The tallest section of the wall is about sixteen inches. One-man boulders pop up here and there as step-downs, places where the wall drops to stay in scale against the sloping yard.
