Woodland art at Kinross Creek

Posted on February 17, 2024 by Ian Kinross

Fresh snowfall and chillier temperatures make it feel more like winter in Minden Hills after an unusually mild December and January.

In the woods towards Kinross Creek, the sightlines are longer through the bare hardwood trees above a crisp, white forest floor. On my yard-sale snowshoes, I get up the hill and, as usual, find myself following deer tracks to my destination.

Crossing the creek, I notice an unusual pattern on a large tree stump maybe a hundred yards down the deer highway. From a distance, it looks like a Haida totem pole.

Up close, I can see that a woodpecker has been at this old maple stump, carving a series of holes to get at insects inside the decomposing wood. Some of these holes have caught and cupped the recent snowfall — creating a natural artwork in the forest.

Nearby, a smaller tree bent over in a storm creates a magic arch for the deer to pass under on their journey.

I’d assumed the creek would be frozen solid in February, but with recent thaws it is carrying off a fair bit of water from the surrounding valley. In Ali’s pond, I catch the reflection of the bare tree tops and a small conifer upstream.

I’ve been reading a bit about “vernal” ponds like this, which swell in spring and often dry out in summer. Because they are not big enough for fish, many provide habitat for amphibians such as frogs, toads and salamanders, as well as fairy shrimp (a crustacean) and insects. I make a note to check out areas of the creek next summer for more signs of aquatic life.

Using my ski poles for balance, I tramp up to the hydro tower, which has its own strange geometry, not to mention a warning about voltage. It’s minus 10 Celsius this afternoon, and I recall our teachers warning us in winter not to lick the metal fence next to our elementary school. I have no plans to touch this particular hydro tower today, mostly because up above it is carrying 220,000 volts.

On the way down the hill, I spot a few more interesting shapes and textures — a dense bird’s nest woven into the spikey branches of a thorn-apple tree, and some wildflower seeds waiting to take flight above the snow pack — nature’s art.

Building a foundation for Colleen’s pond

Posted on November 18, 2023 by Ian Kinross

A touch of frost overnight in mid-November. On my walk over to Kinross creek, the morning sun is low, casting long shadows off a horse in the pasture next to the road. He’s nibbling the last of the grass before the snow flies.

With the longer nights, heavier dew and recent rains, Kinross Creek has now filled up Ali’s new pond!

To boot, the creek is now gurgling downriver again, towards the future site of Colleen’s pond. (This stretch had mostly dried out for a couple of months in summer.)

When I was here in October, I discovered a pile of larger stones nearby. My task today is to get them over to the creek to start the foundation for Colleen’s pond. With help from a spade, I pry up the big stones and send them rolling down the small hill to the creek. They are too heavy to lift, so they get rolled end-over-end the rest of the way.

In the bare canopy of the hardwood forest, two Blue Jays keep an eye on me, and confer in a call-and-response screech. The prettier song of a chickadee can be heard faintly, too.

Both bird species are survivors — they find or stash enough food to get them through the cold winters in Minden Hills, when most other birds have migrated south. Tiny Chickadees squirrel away seeds in the cracks of trees — even in the cracks of siding on our cottage next to Minden Lake. This gives them little caches of food to visit throughout the winter. The bigger and bolder Blue Jays seem to enjoy the canopy of conifers like Balsam, which provide shelter and likely some seeds and berries that are easier to find when the snow falls.

I wrestle the larger stones into the creek bed and begin to build out the foundation of Colleen’s pond. Basically I’m enlarging a pond already created in this spot by an enormous fallen tree. The rotting tree limbs have been moved aside, and a stone semi-circle is going in at the downriver half of the pond.

I stand on stepping stones in the creek to consider my work in progress, and note my next tasks: smaller stones on the west side, and some bigger stones to bring the east side into symmetry.

It’s getting warm in this tiny river valley. Protected from the wind and with the deep frost still about a month away, the creek area still features lush green moss. Fallen maple leaves drift and swirl in the water.

My balance is not great. After moving the big stones, I am getting achy, impatient and slightly fuzzy-brained. I want to do some more work but risk slipping off a rock and having to make an embarrassing cell phone call to Nadine. “Help, I’m flat on my back, up on the hydro corridor.”

I wander up to Ali’s pond to wash my hands and admire the stillness of this spot.

On the hike back down the hill, I scout out some stone for my next visit. I squirrel away a couple of small piles and note their locations. These will be used to finish up the foundation for Colleen’s pond.

The forest fungi enjoy this time of year. On a huge fallen poplar tree, the strange shapes and subtle greys of a fungi remind me of a forest Banksie. Just like an urban Banksie painting, the beauty of the natural world can flash and vanish.

On second glance, each individual fungi looks like a little toque.

Back at the road, my horse friend is still nibbling — to beat the next frost.

Riverbed restoration at Kinross Creek

Posted on September 17, 2023 by Ian Kinross

The first fall colours in Minden Hills are subtle — the purples and whites of wild asters blooming in September on the roadside, yellow goldenrod, the browns and beiges of forest fungi, green milkweed pods ripening. Not quite the splendor of traditional fall colours — of maple and other hardwoods we will see in October — but just as rich and diverse in their own way.

Kinross Creek is bone dry downriver of the two “check” dams built this spring. As the nights get longer with heavier dew, the creek should flow again soon, spilling into Ali’s pond with its stone semicircle smile. The creek is in the woods near the hydro corridor, about a 40-minute hike from our cottage.

I use the opportunity to wander along the dry creek bed, downriver to the edge of the valley, the spot where Kinross Creek transforms to a cascading waterfall when the snow melts each spring.

There are hundreds of stones of diverse shapes and sizes revealed in the dry creek bed today. For someone who likes working with stone, this is mecca.

A site for the next check dam presents itself. The top of a huge dead tree has fallen across the creek. When the water ran here earlier this year, the deadfall created a natural pond. But it also diverted the flow of the creek to the side, away from its original course. The remaining vertical tree stump is a sentinel, about 8-feet high, marking the spot.

So I start to pull away the fallen part of the trunk and limbs from the creek bed, to replace them with the next stone check dam. This stone feature will restore the original creek course and feed into Colleen’s pond just downriver.

The woods are still and cool — no bird song but for the occasional screech of a Blue Jay and coarse cry of a crow. The mosquitoes and blackflies that pestered me over the past few visits have vanished.

I mine maybe 25 stones from the dry creek bed and arrange them into the start of a one-rock-high check dam, following the contours of the original creek bed. After a few minutes, I realize my heart is thumping pretty fast — my stonework excitement seems to be giving me a cardio workout.

With the tree cleared and first stones in place, I start to head out, but stumble upon another small stone-pile in the forest. It’s not quite the motherlode, but will add 20 stones to this effort.

In the woods around here, even though I keep my eyes peeled for stones, it is often my feet that find them. When one sticks out of the forest floor to catch my foot, it is typically the tip of an iceberg of many stones — likely piled up by farmers who worked this area before the farm was abandoned.

Likewise, it is often my feet that find remaining relics of barbed wire fences strung perhaps 75 to 100 years ago. When a jagged piece of wire threatens to snare a human rambler, I bend it back out of harm’s way.

The cool weather and subtle colours of early fall make for a nice walk back, after the heat of mid-summer. I come upon a strange and splendid drooping fungi, hanging from the end of a log. Milkweed pods swell and will release their feathered seeds to fly away later this fall.

I’ll be back in October to check the creek flow and start work on the next pond.

Stone terrace twilight

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Ian Kinross

Our bluebird family had flown the coop for warmer climes and the Canada Geese were flying circular training runs in the farm field next to our cottage. Honking in their traditional V-formation, and weaving expertly through a set of hydro lines, they prepared for the journey south.

First frost shimmered on fall colours in Minden Hills, lighting up the leaves of the baby pin oak tree next to our garden.

Several tons of stone and a special order of granite that I had obtained from Brent Coltman and his father Wayne had been formed into new dry-stone terraces surrounding the little cabin in the forest.

The cabin, originally built by my father in law, Claus, and later moved to our place by truck and crane, now had some breathing room in front and back. It would stay higher and drier in the long winter, and it sported a new extended front porch area for future occupants.

For my stone work this year, I had channeled learnings from master stone waller John Shaw Rimmington and my classmates at Haliburton School of the Arts. Working with sometimes gnarly and ancient stone once rolled by glaciers, I had come to appreciate its beauty and history. And yes, as I got into a rhythm, putting the pieces of the dry stone puzzle together, I occasionally dreamt of stone.

The morning frost sent a mist off the lake and up the hill.

Around the cabin site, new perennial hosta plantings blended with a grove of smooth-barked beech. Annual impatiens flashed their final colours of white and pink. Sturdy oak trees continued to rain down their motherlode of acorns for local critters.

By the lake, our stone terrace gardening efforts had yielded some new perennial plants that were now established and should survive the winter. Nadine’s gladiolas and hydrangeas continued to produce beautiful blooms for table arrangements. Annual orange nasturtiums cascaded and collapsed over the stone, touched by frost. The fig trees I had put out in pots for an Italian garden touch would need to be brought inside soon to hibernate during the long Canadian winter.

We were missing our two daughters Ali and Colleen, who were living and working far from home — in Scotland and the U.S.. For this Canadian Thanksgiving, we were joined in Minden by four young adults — two of our nieces, Rachel and Katie, and two family friends, Mehtab and Alva — and Nadine’s mom Ann. They checked out the log cabin in its new stone nest in the forest.

On tap that weekend were some board games, a tour of local artists, and some homework for the youth movement — they were studying engineering, political science, commerce and social work respectively. The highlight was a splendid turkey dinner prepared by Nadine and Ann.

Next to a roaring fire outside, we roasted marshmallows, then coaxed embers around a big beech stump that was slow to burn. Night fell and stars came out across Minden Lake. As the air chilled, we fed the fire and nudged our chairs closer to its warmth.

Haliburton stone — so Gneiss!

Posted on September 30, 2019 by Ian Kinross

As the terraces came into shape, I learned more about the stone I was working with.

“Your geology in Minden and Haliburton is quite different than ours,” explained Nadine’s cousin Jay, who lives with his family in Kingston, Ontario:

“Your stones are well-rounded because they were tumbled in the glacier melt, thousands of years ago. They were left to be found in the sand-glacial till mix.”

Stone farmers

Farmers here know this, as they have been plowing up rocks with rounded edges of all shapes and sizes, and leaving them in rough fencerows, for more than a hundred and fifty years in the Minden area. In fact, I had pilfered quite a few of these beauties from an old farm field boundary behind Nadine’s parents’ cottage on Horseshoe Lake years ago.

As the stones often have a rounded look to them, sometimes they are referred to as “river rock.” Fortunately, many of these tumbled stones do lend themselves to dry stone walling, as they may have at least one set of parallel edges.

Different parts of the country each tell their own stone stories. In contrast to the Minden/Haliburton area, the stone near Jay’s home in Kingston “is still being calved by the freeze/thaw cycle from the original rock,” he noted.

Metamorphosis

My friend Rob had seen the big pile of stone on our front lawn, delivered that spring by local aggregates supplier Brent Coltman. Rob had a closer look and identified the stone as mostly Gneiss (pronounced “nice”).

It’s a metamorphic rock — meaning it has been transformed under high pressure and temperatures. And it was rolled along on journeys propelled by the glaciers that once covered Ontario.

Not only is Gneiss nicely-rounded, but it has a banded, layered texture and splits fairly well. In a few cases where I needed to remove imperfections from a stone, I was able to find the seam of the stone and split off the bad bits with a hammer and stone chisel, and some patience. With a little more skill and practice, I could split more stone where needed to get flat edges.

“You can actually split it like firewood,” said Brent, who had dropped five tons of stone next to our cottage earlier that spring.

So the new terrace walls rising around the log cabin at our cottage were mostly made of Gneiss. And the thicker, heavier capstones I had obtained to top off the walls were from granite seams of rock that had been untouched by glaciers.

An ancient fault-line

Feeding my addiction to dry stone walling, my mother-in-law Ann gave me a book telling the fascinating backstory of stone in Ontario.

I learned about a giant fault line that bisects the tiny town of Miner’s Bay, just a short drive south of our cottage on Highway 35.

Nick Eyles, author of Road Rocks Ontario, describes the clash of two major divisions of the Canadian Shield, seen in the road cut on the highway there. One is the Central Gneiss Belt. The second is the Central Medisedimentary Belt. The contact between these two belts comprises rocks “that were stretched like warm toffee at temperatures up to 800C at a depth of up to 25 kilometres,” Eyles noted. Some Canadian Shield stone in Ontario is more than a billion years old.

The site at Miner’s Bay, which houses a popular old-style lodge between two lakes, “shows a superb outcrop of highly deformed marble.” This is made up of Gneiss and Granite — some of it marbleized and some busted up from tectonic activity. The tiny town also has a pretty church, its walls showcasing the beauty and diversity of local stone.

Eyles hypothesizes about earthquake potential in this area: “It’s an inexact science but (this fault line) may be capable of creating a magnitude 7 earthquake every couple of thousand years. The trouble is we don’t know when the last one was.”

Batten down the hatches!

Learning more about the stone from friends, family, and experts, made me appreciate the material I had been working with that summer to build terraces — its history, composition, and the beauty of its pink and grey layers.

So Gneiss!!

Building with B-grade stone

Posted on September 5, 2019 by Ian Kinross

The log cabin needed some breathing room behind it, to the east, where it nestled into a fairly steep hill. A little terrace there would keep it high and dry in winter, and allow a walk-about around the exterior.

But I had used up the best stone on the first terrace. It now propped up the cabin’s entrance area. I would have to dig deep for more stone.

Many years ago, when our young family had moved into our home on Fulton Avenue in Toronto, the contractor had recommended “tavern-grade” oak for a reno on the main floor. “The B-grade stuff is half the price but actually looks nicer with the variations in grain and colour,” he had told us. Sold!

So my task now was to build a pretty and functional retaining wall out of the remaining B-grade stone. This one would be a book-end to the first terrace, with a straight stretch tracking parallel to the cabin wall, and a freelance curve ending next to a tree.

Working with gravity and gnarly stone

I got the area excavated with a spade, and put down some gravel. With my old wheelbarrow and the benefit of gravity, I trucked the stone downhill to the job site.

The stone was local Gneiss, which had been washed by glaciers here thousands of years ago. The B-grade stone was gnarly, generally less straight than the first batch I had picked, and with rougher edges that sometimes needed to be knocked off with a chisel. Its colours were motley, ranging from pink to dark blue-grey. But as I got the stone sorted, and a straight and level line put in as my guide, the wall started to come together.

Cross-cultural fun

Our younger daughter Colleen had arrived, with her boyfriend Tim, and his family from France. Tim and Colleen stayed in the log cabin, getting a nice view of the lake each morning through the trees. The two families enjoyed some cross-cultural fine dining, both with home-cooked meals and at some nearby eateries.

We also took advantage of a great stretch of weather to swim, canoe and kayak in Minden Lake, and walk to nearby rapids. One day, the gang swam about an hour down the Gull River — an annual tradition known as “floating your hull down the Gull.” We treated ourselves to some Kawartha Dairy ice cream as a reward — gazing at dozens of flavours and their mouth-watering descriptions as we stood in line outside the dairy. Muskoka Mocha, Death by Chocolate, Moose Tracks — there were way too many choices.

Flexing to the flora

The following week, I kept at the stone-walling, building up the second terrace course by course, and packing it with heart-stones. The wall behind the cabin was interrupted by two conjoined trees and their large root-ball — I walled around it rather than remove the trees and roots. They gave the cabin some privacy from the neighbor to the east.

A big old Beech tree had been taken down nearby due to disease, and Nadine suggested some flower pots to go on the tree stumps. We kept it simple, with colourful and shade-tolerant impatiens — by mid-summer they had come into their prime.

I still had some nice heavy capstones left to crown stone terrace number two. The little terrace curved to end at the foot of a young maple tree, which was growing fast. It would add to the forest colour around the cabin, especially in fall.

From B-grade stone had come a cute and functional little A-grade terrace!

“The kids’ cabin”

Posted on July 26, 2019 by Ian Kinross

In the mid-90s, Nadine’s parents Ann and Claus were hosting a growing brood of grandchildren at their cottage on Horseshoe Lake. Where to put them all? They needed a tiny cabin movement.

Claus had been looking at a book of cabin designs and, before you knew it, the wheels started turning. He was planning a small 8 x 12-foot log cabin, one that would be built to last and would honour the 150-plus-year homestead cabin that formed the core of their cottage. And at 96 square feet, it would be just small enough not to require a building permit. He ordered cedar logs from a local farmer.

When the logs were delivered, they needed the bark stripped. Claus’s father, Oscar, then into his 90s, was on hand to help.

Cedar and chocolate

Oscar was seated in a lawn chair, wearing a fedora and sports jacket, and a black patch over a wonky eye. In his hands he had a debarking tool and was stripping bark vigorously one log at a time. As a long-time farmer and lumberman, Oscar knew his way around wood. Nadine and I pitched in to help.

From time to time, the kids would come by, and Claus would prompt Oscar about the chocolate. Oscar had brought a shopping bag of at least a dozen bars of fine chocolate along with him, ready to offer up as a treat to the little people when the moment was right.

Claus found a site for the cabin in the woods just across from the main cottage. He set down a gravel base and levelled it up with the help of a few flat stones from the bush.

The cedar logs were stored to dry over winter.

The cabin-building started in earnest the summer of ’97. Claus had the cedar logs milled to four-inch widths so they could be stacked cleanly. As the log walls came up, he notched the ends, knocked in metal spikes, and caulked each log for a tight fit.

Pitching in

Claus had obtained several old wooden windows from his parents’ former place in Grey Creek, B.C., including a two-part solid casement window. They would be a sentimental link to the past, and functional for the future. He took measurements and left space for four windows and a door in the structure. Two windows could be opened for a through breeze.

The wheels were turning on the door too — he had plans for a sturdy but decorative door with diagonal strips that would complete the picture once the structure was built.

Friends and family pitched in. Our brother-in-law Frank worked on the electrical — including supply, lighting and sockets. Nadine and I installed the red shingle roof to match the cottage, working our way around the dormer over the front porch that Claus had added. Nadine figured out the math to get the shingles aligning correctly as we roofed the dormer channel. Claus cut some decorative cedar siding strips to adorn the peak underneath the porch roof.

Meanwhile, Ann and Claus continued to host friends and family who watched the construction unfold. Neighbors dropped by to check progress, offer advice, be inspired, and have a beer.

Finishing touches

During the third summer, in ’98, Claus finished the interior with several beds. The cabin was nestled nicely into the woods, built solid and ready for grandkids. Nadine and Ann sourced some mattress foam and covers. Linens and pillows were procured for a proper nesting of the interior. Claus asked for contributions for a time capsule that he would hide in a secret spot in the cabin for posterity. As he finished up the cabin interior, he placed a coffee tin inside and asked the kids to put their contributions into the tin time capsule.

Some flat heavy granite steps fronted the cabin porch to the green space outside the cottage. “It’s a 100-year cabin,” Claus declared proudly.

Cabin christening

Ali remembers some unique details of the first sleepovers: “We were given little bowls of Cheerios that we were supposed to eat in the morning to distract us for a little while so the adults could sleep in past 6:30 a.m.!” The kids also played tricks with an electronic baby monitor device. It was installed with good intent to monitor signs of life in the cabin, but the kids got devious, hamming it up over airwaves so that the adults would have to investigate.

Anna recalls the excitement of having her own cabin: “I remember running into the cabin during particularly dramatic rainstorms and listening to the rain and thunder, feeling very cozy but also closer to the storm.”

Cabin for 7

The tiny cabin movement had begun. As more grandkids came along — Chantal, Paul, Rachel, Felix — Claus would continue to add sleeping quarters, turning double bunks into triple bunks with some ingenious carpentry, and adding a small bunk on the west side.

“My favourite was when the middle lower bed was added as the entire lower level was like a big sleepover,” recalls Ali. “The smallest kid had to sleep on the bench bunk, so both Rachel and Felix had to put up with that for awhile.”

“We would play all sorts of games like Ghost Town trying to get everyone settled down but it was tough as everyone was so excited.”

Colleen remembers: “We had quite a book craze with the Goosebumps series. Someone would read aloud and we would discuss what to pick for the “choose your own adventure” challenge. We often had adult visitors who would read a story or two as we were going to bed.”

“As an early-to-bedder I enjoyed many nights hidden away on the cozy top bunk while the chatting continued late into the night between my sister and cousins.

Anna recalls every summer feeling “a bit intimidated to try to get into the top bunks and feeling very proud once I finally got up there!” The kids dressed up the cabin for parties and special occasions: “I remember carrying Rachel into the cabin on a ‘stretcher’ (boogie board) so that she could safely deliver stuffed animals to the ’emergency room’ we created there.”

The cabin also hosted a few adults, and was popular with the children of guests Ann and Claus entertained over the years.

All in the family

Before he passed away, Claus asked that the cabin be kept in the family if possible. With Nadine, he scouted out a possible site in the woods next to our cottage. Ann was preparing to sell the cottage on Horseshoe Lake and kindly offered to move the cabin. Local crane operator Chuck Hopkins obliged, taking the log cabin on a 5K road trip to its new ‘hood.

The tiny cabin movement would continue — on a site nestled in a grove of oak and beech, overlooking a pretty corner of Minden Lake.

Granite capstones: Icing on the cake

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Ian Kinross

A nice capstone will make a stone waller salivate. They are hard to find, but they are the icing on the cake for a dry stone wall, adding architectural detail as well as structural integrity.

As my dry stone terrace rose, I was on the lookout for capstones. Brent Coltman, a neighbour on nearby Horseshoe Lake Road who supplied much of my stone for the terrace project, suggested I pay his Dad a visit.

I met Wayne Coltman at his place south of Minden, in old farm country along the winding Deep Bay Road. In his early 80s, Wayne still works full time in the aggregates business, providing excavation and supplying materials such as gravel and sand for construction. Wayne also keeps his hand in music, playing electric bass for a local band.

Finding a stone mecca

We hopped in Wayne’s white pickup and drove through the old farm on his property, touring his gravel pit before heading up a hill through the forest. We arrived at a small granite quarry littered with gorgeous slabs of pink and grey granite.

I could have my cake and eat it too! The first granite stones that caught my eye would work perfectly for some extra steps leading to the cabin, I thought. They were about four feet wide, two inches thick, and heavy. Wayne and I grabbed the ends, picked them up and walked them to the road.

“I have to take care of the fingers so I can keep playing music,” he joked, as he lifted half of a stone that must have weighed over a hundred pounds and was making my back ache. While he went back to get a bigger machine to haul the stone, I scouted out capstones for the terrace.

The June mosquitoes were feasting on me and seemed to especially enjoy the area behind my ears. I zipped up my jacket and started hauling capstones — picking them up and treading carefully back to the road, or sometimes dragging them if too heavy.

Special delivery

When Wayne returned, we lifted them into the bucket of his front-end loader and bounced back along the road to his house. I got about half of the stones into the back of our minivan, and drove them home carefully along the highway, making sure I did not have to brake in a hurry with the heavy load.

Later, Nadine and I came back to get the other half. Wayne was in his garage doing some welding repairs. He lifted his welding goggles, and put down his torch. We had a nice chat about his farm, which includes a gorgeous pond next to his house.

Back at our cottage on Minden Lake, I used a hand trolley to wheel each stone down to the project site. The terrace was coming up nicely but went slightly off level around its curve. I knew I could bring it up to a better level with some thicker capstones on the curved end. So I got busy getting the thickest stones over there first.

The summer side of life

Across from the cottage, the Bluebirds were busy feeding their chicks — swooping in with the food, and out with the guano. Under our cottage porch, Swallows had nested. The birds were active mornings and evenings, flitting around the farm fields next door.

While the female Swallow was away, I used a stepladder to climb up and see what was going on. The parents had created a soft nest of feathers and twigs on top of their sturdier foundation on top of our porch column. The first chick had broken its speckled egg and hatched, a tiny pink thing with a black beak. Three unbroken eggs showed that three more chicks were on the way.

Capstone dreaming

Working with the capstones, I used a chisel hammer now and again to chip off unruly edges, to get the stones to fit together better. When a stone was a bit wonky, I used little wedges to stabilize it. To get the back edge straight, I fit in some small cheater stones that would look okay once the terrace was backfilled. Finally, I packed in a few small heartstones around the heavy capstones.

You can get into a trance while stone walling — the process triggers a kind of Zen state. You forget the mosquitos and keep walling. In your trance, you investigate, touch and place every piece of stone. There may be thousands in a small terrace like this one, a cascade of shapes, heft, tactility and colour. That night, it’s no wonder you may dream of stone.

Pretty soon the capstones were fitting together nicely on top, bringing the terrace up to a nice level of about 3 feet high. I would have more work to do with the terrace garden, and another retaining wall behind the cabin.

But for now, the icing was on the cake.

Pieces of the puzzle

Posted on July 4, 2019 by Ian Kinross

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.

A sturdy foundation

Posted on June 21, 2019 by Ian Kinross

The stones were speaking to me…

With the site excavated and gravel base in place, it was time to build the foundation for the stone terrace garden.

I had been “mining” my new five-ton stone pile for the biggest, squarest stone I could find. It wasn’t quite like finding a needle in a haystack, but I would smile whenever I dug out a nice foundation stone.

A palette of stone

As the stone migrated to the job site by wheelbarrow and hand-trolley, I grouped like-minded stone in clusters. If stone-walling is like oil painting, I wanted a nice palette to choose from. I also wanted a surplus of stone close at hand, so I could keep on a roll. A few of the absolute best stones were earmarked for the corners — they would act as anchors for the foundation.

Our resident blue birds kept busy flying in and out of their bird box with nesting material. It had been a late spring and we hoped the female would settle down soon to lay her eggs. Meanwhile, swallows had nested on our front porch and would make a racket and fly away whenever we opened the front door.

Next door, a few cows roamed the pasture at Cox Farm. Rhubarb was sprouting in our garden, and lilac bloomed in our front yard. After a long winter, summer had truly arrived.

The gravel base for the terrace was a straight seven feet, with a freelance curlicue at the end for architectural interest. I dug in and started to rough in the bigger stones, and used a rubber mallet to tap them together as tightly as possible.

Keeping a tight fit

In a few cases, I chiselled off small edges for a tighter fit. The gravel base had some give, so when a foundation stone was slightly misshapen I could work the flaw into the base; that way, the upper side stayed as level as possible for the second course. Once in awhile, I took a break to back to spot and correct any serious flaws in level or placement.

The next task was hearting — carefully packing in smaller stones to create integrity inside the structure. I worked my way on bended knee along the line of foundation stones, packing about six buckets of heartstones inside.

I checked the wall from above. A light rain brought out the variegated colours of the stone foundation, including its curlicue at the south end. The muted pinks, greys, blacks and blues of the stone stood out nicely against the green of the oaks, birch and ironwood trees nearby.

So pretty — but also a pattern that would be hidden forever once the terrace was fully built. Better get a photo for posterity!

The stone terrace garden now had a sturdy foundation.

kinrosscordless

Tag Archives: Dry stone walling