(If you’d like to follow this project from the beginning you can start at Step 1 here)

Step 6 of Rear Garden Design Project.

June, 2002

River rock walls with temporary steps reclaimed from the basement

Sometimes you design a project and don’t foresee some of the unexpected pitfalls to your vision so you try to make it work. It is important to recognize when to change course and try another solution. This happened with my idea about using round river rock on the terraced stone walls.

I wanted to keep the materials for the walls somewhat aligned with the natural stone found on the property. I didn’t have enough of my own local stone to do all the walls for the entry and the dry streambed so I bought 3 bins of Pennsylvania River Rock to supplement what I already had.

Running out of rock. To the right is the temporary bridge over the dry stream bed

What I didn’t expect was that, even with landscape fabric behind the rocks, the soil was going to come through the walls and seep into the drainage system. We worried each time we had a major rainstorm that if the drains clogged the guest room would flood. This development was so unacceptable to us we zigged and zagged for an acceptable design solution.

We bought more stone as the solution to all our problems. Hmmm.

So what did we do? We bought more stone of course. This time it was flat stone, which we felt would be a tighter solution to the seeping soil problem. We’re on our way forward…again.

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Go to Step 7 – Building Our Stone Steps

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