Curiosity & Creativity

Our relationship to stone starts with need, function, safety, shelter, tools, longevity, and is evolved through the masons skill, creativity, and curiosity. Anyone who mindfully sets one stone upon another is a mason while they apply themself and learn the basic laws that apply stone. 

These are my children when they small...with no adult ideas upon their brains for what they might do with stone. Pretty cairns, flowers, cars, and many other things appeared before we built a little wall.

Finding similar shaped stones for the petals of a leaf, finding wheels for the car, or making a pointy stone out of a soft piece of shale for the letter A. Children are all creativity and curiosity. It is a beautiful thing to watch young children explore materials in nature. The simple stick becomes a wand that transforms the world around them and stories unfold.

Staying connected to being curious by nature as we age can be challenging....

I find myself daydreaming looking at stone in the simplest of ways..

A day at my aunts house in Arizona and the first thing I see in her garden is this giant quartz crystal....

I immediately think of it harnessing energy and directing at someone to heal...

An ancient healing tool.

A roughly shaped 'heart stone'....

A heart is a heart...they always make me pause.

Putting together many to create one..

Curiosity and creativity have been the two favorite elements to apply to the needs of customers. I never know what will be in the piles of stone that I get delivered by the dump truck or in pallets.

Yet structure and function have to exist. When I apply curiosity and creativity structures change. 

This is a mini Scottish Broch I made for a client in Burlington Washington in 2017

with granite. 35 tons 9' tall, 15' wide

They have a soul. The hand of man is revealed...You could give give 10 different masons the same materials, parameters, site, and materials and the Broch would look completely different each time. We all have our own unique approach to how we build and that I think this founded in our childhood relationship with curiosity and creativity.

I started Borrowed Ground in 2007. I was curious about stone. It was this amazing raw material that was totally different from one type of stone to another. I had to apply and hone my skills through being creative, while being willing to fail until I was successful. 

Stone by stone...

Each project we start begins with one stone. It sets the tone for all others that follow in response to it's mathematical proportions and character. Generally I like to start with a good sized stone and build out in enough directions where my crew and I can see where we are going. 

On this project I knew we were building a 6' tall dry stone retaining wall with granite from Idaho and Washington state. As per our engineer we dug down into bedrock 12" to toe in our foundation into the Chuckanut sandstone. 12" of foundation stone which I still had to build up another 9" to the top of our foundation stone! On top of that it was about 3-4' wide for the length of the wall. Aside from all the tonnage and work never to be seen... I knew we would have three sets of 'through stones' in this wall and decided to play with that detail starting with the large stone I craned into place.

Through Stones provide bonding deeper into retaining walls, and transfer laid to the back face of dry stone fences....

In this case...looking down on our wall, you can see our wall stones are about 12" deep on average. Our Through Stones are 30-36" long and overlap the stones in the back of our wall. They are set in modern dry stone retaining wall and dry stone fence construction at 18" in height, and every 36" in length of the wall. This repeats as you build up to what ever height. It is a working stone that every trained and certified dry stone mason will use in their construction. They add decades to the life of structures.

Usually we set these flush to the face of the wall. I wanted this length of wall to have a bit of character very subtly and calmly. 

From here we wrapped around the corner and built a water feature into the wall.

And so stone by stone you see the pattern language revealed with the wall stones, through stones, cap stones, and even the large boulders which have the 'feather and wedge' drill holes left on the faces. The first stone I set was the large boulder below the set of three 'through stones'.

From here we needed to build stairs up to the top of the property for another intimate patio.

This image is to the right of the water feature. The first few steps were hand carved into the boulder. Our outdoor fireplace is mortared Montana Slate with tight joints, and a granite cap. We used a different tone our out door fireplace to set it apart from the other features.

And up we go around the water feature to the upper patio. Staging for this project is complicated, tight, and slow for installation as we work from a platform on top of the pond cutting our stones to fit for the wall above. Room for 2 people max here.

When we started developing this space in the backyard and collaborating with the client, engineers, and plant landscapers we knew we wanted the wall, a water feature, an out door fireplace and BBQ, a small patio, and a main entertaining area. For us at Borrowed Ground, we build unique spaces in natural stone wether it is mortared, or a dry stone structure. Our crew fluctuates a bit from year to year, we travel around the state of Washington(even the islands), work in a wide range of styles, and continually strive to exceed our clients expectations. Not all of our jobs are of this scale. We work the same for each customer creating unique spaces that are fundamentally built to the highest quality of masonry standards, and artistic detail stone by stone.

Transitional Dry Stone Elements

        Transitional Dry stone elements in the landscape help us read and move through it more smoothly, flowing from one point to the next. They strengthen connections between plantings and hardscaping, indicate relationships with materials and pattern languages, provide us with contrast, give us direction physically & visually with destination features, as well as providing high quality dry stone structures. A landscape may require stairs, a dry stone retaining wall, an arch, a dry stone fence, or any number of other stone elements to solve an existing transition. Each site is unique to the landscape, design parameters, materials, and budget.

In this simple transition it is fairly obvious that we needed a retaining wall to hold back soil as well as creating a clean boundary between the driveway and the landscape.

We built a 4' tall by 60' long dry stone retaining wall using a Montana Slate, and cleaned up the hillside of blackberries. The cedar  was critically damaged by previous excavators.

       Some transitions are awkward grade changes that require very clear traffic control solutions coupled with creativity and beautiful stone work. This grade change over 11' was so strong that we decided to break the stairs into two separate landings.

The large boulder is Olivine and the low dry stone retaining wall is Montana Slate.

This project needed stairs, dry stone retaining walls, flat work, and raised parking spots in the front of the house. This was the most interesting transitional element to build because we were able to design the dry stone retaining wall to have a corner with stairs, that at 24" in height also functioned well as a bench.

Here our dry stone retaining wall turned into stairs to provide a transition between the patio area and the upper gardens

Some of my favorite sites to work in are in tight city lots with steep slopes. 

Transitional elements in the landscape can function in a multitude of ways... 

-They can provide emphasis & contrast between spaces....

In these cases between the driveway and the entrance .

Some of these elements are more artistic and architectural in nature and visually draw us in as destinations in the landscape.

This 11' tall Inukshuk weighs 18 tons. My friend Cameron Scott and I built this for the Seattle Flower and Garden Show in 2008. People flocked here to have their pictures taken in front of it.

This large piece of granite we used for a wall end  was a  great detail for the stairs, landing and bench.

This is a dry stone fence I rebuilt in Shaker Village Kentucky . I loved  how the small  lunky detail allowed for animals and water to pass through, as well as accommodate the roots of the tree.

This is a detail from a dry stone Gothic Arch Cameron & I built for the same display that year. Again people were drawn to this detail instinctually because of the importance placed on the transition between landscape and pathway. 

All of these elements are dry stone structures. I often find myself thinking lineally as just building as a dry stone waller and landscaper, but there is so much more to these structures than just that. 

Stone... structure... function... landscape... portals... man... stories... transitions...

I think the symbolism is endless depending upon what thread you head down along that path.

Dry Stone Gothic Arch project

Dry Stone Gothic Arch

I have to start here with these cantilevered stairs before I talk about the arch. These wind up the hill to the arch with the retaining wall eventually turning into a low fence/ bench seat before the arch.

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When I designed this detail I wanted our stairs and retaining wall to wind like a ribbon up the hill-around the trees-into an arch- and then into a low 24" tall retaining wall that ran up hill to another set of stairs.

This is my foundation on the left side for the dry stone arch. It is about 24"tall and the beginning of the low dry stone retaining wall. The piece of granite on the right came from a large boulder on site that we split down, leveled off, and shot up the hill with an extension fork lift. It weighs about 2 tons.

On a side note here are the other 2 pieces of granite we used for gate posts up by the house. We are lucky to have a black smith in Bellingham to collaborate with, Arron Loveitt of Altility.

altilityartstudio.com

Here is the gate he designed. It covers up the gas meter, and invokes a sense of private space. This granite split beautifully using feathers and wedges into three  usable pieces. 

You can see the retaining wall taking shape in context to the wall/arch/column.

At about this point I wanted to add another detail for our client in this arch for a finer detail. We wove in an Ogee Arch cut from Penn. Blue stone. On the lintel we cut in the phrase... 'Land of the Free & Home of the Brave'. It looks beautiful. We also cut in holes for recessed lights within it. What is also nice about adding this detail is that it gives the arch another column that accentuates the voussoirs(the stone for the corners of the gothic arch).

We finally got the column up to height to insert our form.

Up with the form, and the scaffolding! You can see the top step and bench wall all tied together before we cut our cap stones and installed them. All these stones are hand carried up the hill by the way! We spend a lot of time laughing at each other under some absurdly heavy stone that we carry up each day. 80% of the stones find a home in the project as a wall stone... the rest wind up as hearting(fill stone) having fractured under our hammer....

Here is a detail of the Ogee Arch. You can't read the inscription because we just rinsed the wall down.

Here we are looking down from the upper path, by the gate. We installed the arch here in the clients landscape so they would have visual access to it from the bedroom windows.

The arch is coming up nicely, and I am super happy with how level I have been able to keep my column courses. At almost 7' in height it barely moves when we push on it from the side. We put our cap stone on the low bench/fence wall. It is not tied into the arch at all. Life on the scaffolding has been challenging to say the least.

So...

Here we are as of yesterday. I am cutting cap stone for the top of the wall for more weight, to keep water out of the wall, add height and remove the neighbors landscape from view. I am planning on adding a couple layers of turf flipped over for the top to plant native plants on. It should look older and pretty cool when we are done....

I think we are at about 7' or so  below the caps.

And we are still looking for our key stone for the arch....

We found it sitting right by our truck!

Here Gary Henderson is drilling holes to split off 1/3 of this boulder

to generate enough material we can continue to split into our keystone.

You really need to split off a larger chunk than you need, so as you continue to shape it, you have enough mass on the material you want to remove to control it evenly. That was our split with 'feathers and wedges'... 5 setups to reveal the key stone. Patience and consistency lead to great results.

View from the cantilevered stairs looking up at the arch.

So there we are! The arches turned out great. What a journey! I love that we can take a few basic rules-for dry stone walling, apply exceptions to those rules & discipline, and build exceptional details in the landscape.

Here we are looking the other direction. I love how it feels like two totally different arches from each side. Essentially they are, as visually you have totally different language in the landscape that informs the arch and the viewer.

I like how dramatic this is... subtly revealing other details.

Granite Curbing for Cobble Stone Driveway

At some point during this project our client decided upon a cobble stone driveway to replace the failing asphalt driveway. Our parameters were that we use the correct material for the site( granite or porphyry), the materials must be from USA origins, and feel timeless. So after getting samples form all over the USA,we had to choose between new or reclaimed. The new material felt 'dead', was all the same dimensionally & texturally, and really had no personality yet. We liked a reclaimed granite from Massachusetts best because of it's historical context, personality, color range, texture, and size.We chose to purchase our material from Stone Farm( www.stonefarmliving.com ) in Massachusetts. We also purchased reclaimed curbing to hold our cobbles in on the downhill side of the driveway. 

So once our materials began to arrive....

We began unloading our materials in 20 ton containers... needing 120 tons for the project.We separated the materials and hauled them back to our sit.From there we excavated the hillside, established finished elevation of curbing and new cobblestone driveway, and poured a 70' long grade beam with re bar.

Two of my helpers after school, Devin Trub on left & Noah Beardsley-my son on right,
myself Russ Beardsley in center.
Grade beam at left...

Last week we finished installing this beautiful reclaimed granite. Most pieces arrived 7' long by 6" thick at the top of face to 12" at base, by 18" tall. We had to feather and wedge each piece to accommodate their new home. Our little MT-52 was easily able to pick up each piece of granite and manipulate it in place hanging from a chain choker. We will install our below grade drainage pipes and back fill along the front, and install soil for fill along the back to accommodate new plantings.


It is really great to be working with dry stone retaining walls & fences, a cobble stone driveway, and mortared elements all within this one area for this project. Personally I love the challenges this job has presented for Borrowed Ground because it has really pushed me to reevaluate how I work in the landscape for clients, work more in traditional wet masonry, and work with materials that don't exist here in the Pacific Northwest.