Building with Native Stone

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And damn, but it is satisfying! A hard-won satisfaction, to be sure; rock weighs a lot, goes up hard, and comes down harder. First of all, then, let's talk about how to keep that stone from denting you up too much as it moves in either direction.

Forewarned

G et yourself a pair of horsehide gloves, a well-fitting pair of hard-toed, hightopped boots, and stout, long-legged trousers. Rock is abrasive and heavy, and building walls with it is a totally engrossing task that tempts you to forget safety. With proper outer wear, you can avoid the scratches and dents—and ignore the occasional rolling stone—that otherwise can mess up both your hide and your concentration. Instep and toes are the body parts most at hazard, so proper boots are particularly important: They let you put a foot anywhere that best leverage demands without worrying about getting laid up.

Probably your most valuable piece of equipment is a healthy back. Know the old adage "Lift with your legs, not your back"? Well, you can just about forget it in wall building. Instead, don't lift any rock at all that's bigger than you can heft easily sitting down. Roll it, slip it, slide it, or flip it over end to end. Use ramps or levers or sleds. And when you must use brute force, get behind and push with your legs: Bending double at the waist and heaving up on a heavy rock is an invitation to a month of forced bed rest.

Oh, yes: Start off easy. Anyone in average good health can work rock. But you'll probably be employing muscles that haven't been used much before. So go slow at first, particularly if (like me) you find the urge to raise stone walls comes on at the first warm spring day following a muscle-softening winter. Chances are, your rock has rested where you first found it for upwards of 20,000 years minimum and is in no hurry to move. Don't rush it. The stones won't mind, and your back might.

Helpful, but not essential, are a set of rock-working tools like those shown in Fig. 1. You can find the common—and most useful—heavy mallets and brickmason's chisels at any country hardware store, or in mail-order or wholesale catalogs under "Trowel Trades" or "Mason's Supplies". Locating the big pry, star drills, railroad spikes, and other tools you'd need for any do-it-yourself quarrying may take a little searching. I'm told there are pointed quarrier's sledges and such niceties as wedge-and-shim splitting tools available, too, but I've never used them. If you really want to get into shaping stone, visit your local burial-monument works for advice and tool sources. And be sure to wear a long-sleeved shirt and use safety goggles during any hammer-and-chisel work. Rock chips can be sharper than a surgical scalpel, and they fly of the work at considerable speed.

Reading the Rock

Most of what I've read about stone building presumes a good supply of table rock (soft sedimentary rock such as shale, sandstone, or perhaps a nice smooth-grained limestone that was originally laid down as sheets of alluvial silt, sand, or tiny seashells at the bottom of ancient seas). Many such pieces retain their granular structure and multilayered sedimentation pattern and can consequently be easily worked into shape. (Some can be split up as even and square as brick with little more than a hand ax!) If you are so fortunate as to have access to good-building sedimentary stone, God bless.

On my own Berkshire mountain plateau, there's a mix of the other two—less malleable—major rock types: igneous and metamorphic. Interspersed all too liberally through the garden loam are fieldstones . . . called cobbles or hardheads by local folk and glacial erratics by geologists. The more or less round hunks of igneous rock were formed of minerals that melted deep in the earth's innards, cooled to become crystalline rock such as granite or feldspar, and in time broke off and rolled down to us under the Pleistocene glaciers. Where bedrock pokes out of our pasture as ledge, there's a soft and greasy, easy-splitting mica schist-a metamorphic rock. Marble and slate are more familiar varieties of metamorphic stone. All are sedimentary (or other) rocks that were heated sufficiently by underground pressure to fuse, but not enough to cause a full meltdown and reformation as igneous.

Unless you can afford to have flat rock hauled in from the nearest quarried outcropping (in which case you can doubtless afford your own mason to go with it!), you, like me, will be building with what you have at hand. And, unless you have a lot of time and patience—or a pneumatic hammer and chisel to work stones into shape—you'll probably be using your native stone pretty much as you find it.

Where's that, you ask? Unfortunately for my garden, I've never had to search out stone myself. Rocks "grow" out of our New England soil as glacial erratics are pushed skyward each year by heaving frost. If you are not so blessed, look along creeks or riverbeds, where roads cut through rolling country, or wherever heavy construction is going on. Rock often crops up where someone doesn't want it and is consequently free for the taking. Even if you have to buy local stone, it is cheap. The loading and hauling is what'll really cost you.

Don't bother to try building a wall out of gravel or even a pile of fist-sized cobblestones. A lot of little rocks would give the wall so much travel that it would fall apart in short order. You want rocks that are a good double handful and larger . . . the bigger the better. (Some parts of the country offer great slabs of stone that need busting up and will give you a chance to learn what "hard labor" really means.)

To some degree, the kind and shape of your available rock will dictate the internal dimensions of your wall. It needn't decide what you build, however. There are cross-country walls in China and in Great Britain, pyramids in Mexico and in Egypt, and monuments and temples all over, each of "dressed"—squared and trued—stone of all varieties, laid by hand hundreds or thousands of years ago and still standing. Within an hour's drive of my own place are buildings and foundations of big stone, small stone, round stone, and flat stone. I know several local fences so well made, though of potentially unstable—almost globular—fieldstone, that they have lasted with no maintenance for 200 years.

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