With a sturdy foundation in place, it was onwards and upwards for the stone garden terrace.

Inside our cottage, Nadine, her mom and a friend were grouping like-minded pieces for a jig-saw puzzle depicting a classic canoe. Outside, I was using the same approach for the stones that would form the second and third courses of the terrace. With like-minded stone close at hand, I could move faster once I started building each course.

Smelling the roses

My dry-stone mentor John Shaw-Rimmington had advised our class at Haliburton School for the Arts to step back now and again — to see from a distance how the stones fit together.

This was the stone-walling equivalent of smelling the roses. Sometimes a stone that looked good up close was clearly out of order when seen from afar, and could be adjusted or replaced before it became embedded in the structure.

So I did a lot of stepping back and peering at the little stone terrace as it rose next to the cabin. In fact, whenever Nadine caught a glance at me stone-walling, she said I usually had my hands on my hips, arms akimbo, peering at the stones. For inspiration, I nestled a pot of pink and white impatiens next to the terrace.

Rocking and rolling

By nudging up the string next to the straight section of terrace, and checking its level, I could chase it upwards in slow motion with the stone-building. Stones that rocked and rolled a bit too much were wedged with thin stone shims to get them to settle down. Each course was carefully packed with hearting to get it tight and ready for the next course.

Next door, the farmer was raking his hay.  I could hear the drone of the machine as he swept by. The next day, he came back with the baler and wound the dried hay into huge bundles.  They would be wrapped in white plastic, resembling massive puffy marshmallows, and stored outside to give his cows feed through the long winter.

On a misty summer morning, the hay bales loomed large outside our cottage front door.

A special blend

As the terrace wall came up with each course, I began to backfill it with some better soil. I trundled with the wheelbarrow over to our nearby veggie garden. There a special blend of quadruple mix was concocted, using equal parts of garden soil, compost, peat moss and some worm castings.

This new soil mix was a step up from the sandy clay next to the cabin, and would provide a nutrient-rich bed for the terrace garden, once complete.

To get the terrace as level as possible for the final layer of heavy capstones, I used slimmer stones in the fourth, and penultimate, course. For the freelance curve at the south end, I had cheated, using just three layers of larger stone. The curve dipped slightly off level, but I made a mental note to try to fix that with the capstones.

Piece by piece

The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Inside our cottage, the wilderness image of a cedar canvas canoe slowly emerged on our card table as Nadine, Ann and Mary Jo worked on the 1,000-piece jigsaw, after some swimming and kayaking in Minden Lake. Outside, the stone wall was rising.

Like a ball player getting ready for the summer season, I went into spring training — in this case, to flex my dry-stone-walling chops. I needed to be in top shape to tackle a bigger project this summer — a pretty garden terrace to go around the little log cabin Nadine’s father built.

Little cabin awaits its stone terrace. This cedar log cabin was built by my father-in-law Claus for his grandkids.  He and my mother-in-law Ann wanted to keep it in the family, so gifted the cabin to our Minden Lake cottage last year. 

At the edge of Minden Lake, our stone patio and terraces have been emerging over the past couple of years. Slowly, they’ve brought some order and easy access to a jumbled bit of land near the corner of our lot. We’ve even started to dress up the Italian-inspired terraces in summer with some cascading annuals like orange nasturtium and some lush perennial shrubs such as white hydrangea.

A little piece of Italy…

To bring a little piece of Italy to Minden, Ontario, we had overwintered two fig trees in pots in our cottage basement, ready to put out in the warmer weather. After going into hibernation in the winter months, the fig stems had started to bud out with the warmer March sun through the cottage windows. As well, we had found some hardy Ontario grape vines that might add a Tuscan feel to our Canadian terraces. These had been planted — somewhat optimistically — the previous fall.

Some lemon and fig trees would complete the Italian picture, I thought, but that might be pushing it.

My spring training goal this year was to finish up a little terrace I had started the previous year. Nadine, who was eager to plant gladiolus and dahlias in that area, had flagged this little terrace as a priority. Check!

Foraging for stone

Half the battle in dry stone walling is staging the site — getting the right stone materials in place, close at hand. It had been a tough winter and I began to scrounge for stone on our property.  Some was still stuck in ice, but each time I found a nice stone, I flung it towards the spring-training site, and organized it there in rough piles on the snow. For bigger pieces, I carted them in a wheelbarrow across the hard snow-pack.

I foraged for heavier foundation stones, and laid them out side by side to get a sense of how they would fit together.  Smaller building stones, and the flat cap stones, were organized in piles. Tiny heart-stones sat in buckets nearby, to be packed in the core of the wall later.

While the Toronto Blue Jays players were playing catch in Florida, Mallard Ducks were perched on the edge of large ice flows on Minden Lake.  Deer came out of the woods hungry for spring greens. Canada Geese in honking “V” formation were flying northward.

Deer in early spring on Horseshoe Lake Road, Minden.

After five months of deep freeze, the frost was coming out of the ground.

No spring-training jumping jacks for me, but I did get a workout excavating the stone terrace site with a shovel, and moving wheelbarrows full of sandy soil further up the hill. This would be used later to backfill the terrace.

Then I made some measurements to get the site straight, and used a mallet to pound marker posts into the ground. These would denote the outer border of the wall. A string between the posts gave me an exact level, as well as the terrace boundary.

A solid foundation

Next came the gravel foundation. While the Jays took batting practice, I was thumping down the gravel base of the terrace with a hand tamper — a heavy, square metal tamper attached to a straight wooden pole.

A groundhog nibbled nearby on the first grass exposed by the thaw, and bolted when he saw me. Cows from the neighboring farm ventured further into the valley next door; they too searched for spring grass and gave me puzzled looks through the fence.

Slowly, the little spring-training terrace wall took shape.

I wasn’t feeling much like an athlete.  In fact, my back and hips were stiffening up.  Besides the stone walling, my recreational ice hockey season was in its home stretch and, in my mid/late-50s, I sometimes felt like a bag of bones after a game.

I took a few stretch breaks to loosen up.  A couple of cups of coffee didn’t hurt. Deep breaths of the cold spring air felt like fuel to keep at it. My Dad, Douglas, taught me that trick when I was a kid, well before mindfulness caught on. Stop, close your eyes, take a deep, cool breath through your nose.

And I reminded myself that moving around stone is often more of a mental than physical exercise. Wherever possible, I used leverage and gravity, and tried to go easy on my back.

Blending Zen and elbow grease

Stone-walling itself is the ultimate mindfulness practice — a nice blend of Zen, jig-saw puzzle patience, and some elbow grease. For a small terrace wall like this one, you might go through a tone of stone — and each one has its unique characteristics, colour, heft and purpose.

I was getting there. Nadine dropped by to do some garden cleanup of the area next to the lake.  I took a breather, sitting on the unfinished wall as I got ready to put on the final courses of stone.

I was still short a couple of heavy capstones.  While driving into town, I spotted some jumbled stone that had been dumped in a “clean-fill” construction waste site next to the road.  Eureka!  I stopped and completed a lightning-fast SWAT mission to load a couple of fine flat pieces of discarded granite into my minivan.

With the caps in place, my stone-wall spring training was complete.

Now we could sit back for a moment, and visualize the bigger project on tap this summer — a pretty stone garden terrace for the little log cabin that Claus built.