Ornamental Gardeners

What you've done with those spaces is really remarkable and must have taken a lot of time, effort and planning to accomplish. When it cools down this fall, I may have to look into a rock feature for the front yard.
 
Thanking you, most kindly.

Benches and garden seats. You need places to sit, right? Like I said, I'm the hardscape guy. Sarge keeps trying to cover everything in plants. Pesky maintenance stuff.

This is the rear of the condo with the pond.
This is a view bench that overlooked a 180º panorama. Sarge literally reshaped the edges and seat of this thing; constant use.

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A sunrise from this bench:
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The horizon line is the Cleveland National Forest / Saddleback Mountain coastal mountain ridgeline. I now live to the right of the image, pretty close to below the sunrise.
 
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Sarge, the spousal unit, has a no shoes in the house policy. And SWMBO must be obeyed.
I have big feet, and getting into shoes can be a wrasslin match. I don't care for that one-legged hop trying to get the shoe on, and sometimes, its just too wet to sit at the porch stoop.
So, i made a front door shoe putting'-on / takin'-off bench.
I built it slightly lower than most benches, to make it easier to wrangle my shoes.
Its so massively overbuilt, it would take a Bobcat tractor to pull it out. Its like 20 bags of concrete and rebar reinforcement to allow for some cantilever effect.


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good riddance to high density southern orange county.
say hello to rural farm land northern san diego county. its far from flat farm land though, with some of it literally requiring rappelling skills; avocado trees get planted in extremely weird places.
 
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Now in the Friendly Village of Fallbrook, and I'm three years into a fairly large scale rock garden. I've also included the engineered concrete retaining-wall dry-stack blocks, extensively, in this new project, due to a large scale need for terracing with a more precise fit.


Minimalist garden seat:
Odd numbers in nature good. Even numbers should be avoided.
My first garden seat in our new rock garden. Two for the seat, and a footrest for the third.
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Taking a few steps back, down the new staircase; dug with shovel, digging bar, wheel barrow. Built with bagged concrete and mixer; concrete by the palette full. This is a fairly inaccessible area for machinery; everything is hand done.

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It goes in lots of directions from here!
Functional dry creek drainages. These are the small ones.

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yay that!


A view from the Shade Garden, where we cultivate shade.
This is our respite from the sun when working outside. The shade garden easily runs 15º to 20º cooler than just outside of it.
It is a stand of old eucalyptus trees, olive tree, and native shrubs.
On arrival it was a rubbish heap filled with large hard objects that they didn't want to haul away (previous owner was proud of his cheap side).
So, I went in, and hauled the junk, and limbed the entire area up to 7' minimum overhead (I'm 6'6").
The Shade Garden has an upper canopy, a mid-canopy, and a surround shell. Its a neat place.

The rocks form three different dry creek paths that are the final steps in a drainage
system that was designed to contain a seasonal stream, and ensure it stays at the rear of the property (in the past, it didn't, as evidenced by my excavations). These are to ensure that any residual flows get captured.


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Sarge likes to cover my rocks with flowers.
In the middle of my patio is a large black granite point of the earth.
Have I mentioned that I like rocks yet? Does this fit with my theme?
Point of earth too big, concrete around it.


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We have a friend in MA who set out, years ago, to turn his (their) backyard into a small-scale model railroad. He brought home tons and tons (even tonnes) of rocks; kind of strewed them about -- but then kind of moved along to other things... :-P

I suspect his wife is still a little irritated to have Stonehenge in their backyard.
 
This, I understand; the rocks strewn everywhere thing. Mine are in organized piles; but, piles attract critters.
I have about 15 tons in back stock. I gathered a bunch at the end of last winter, as the free source was shutting down, and houses were going in in their place.
So, I too have piles of rocks, at the edge of the wilds.
This guys was in my back stock pile sunning himself a few weeks back:
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The main objective in this newest project is to contain a rain off-flow from the hillside above us. The person up there graded a fire access road that changed an 11 acre hillside.
The road went in parallel to the hillside length, and across the bottom of the hill. this makes it a gutter for the hillside that emptied onto our property.
In what I can ascertain, a portion of this, if not all of it would have made it to our place eventually, but adding a collector road just speeds the process, and we get pulse flows.
If we get rain that is sustained at an inch an hour, for anything over an hour, the stream starts to flow from the hillside. The flow goes across the rear of our property where it isn't an issue, unless something diverts the flow upstream, and it comes into a different area of our property; silt deposition has proven this to have happened in the past.
To prevent this again, I endeavored to create a dry creek system, and a series of retaining walls that direct flows to where I want them.
The region to the left of the images is where the flow comes from, and, yo can see the end of an extensive dry creek system.
To the right of the image is where this flow had gone before, through the trees of the Shade Garden.
The retaining wall in this area is 90' long, with a 24' wide, 10" deep footing, and behind the wall drainage system to relieve hydrostatic pressure in the soil.


An overview of a portion of the scale of the new project.Its large enough and spread out far enough that no one picture can cover it.
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Looking back towards first image locations:
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​We had flows coming down what is now the concrete pathway. It was just a dirt path, with thick plants on the low side that had caused silt deposits that caused the path to form into a flow that aimed towards the house. The concrete pathway was built to block that direction, and offer the only flow direction to be into the shade garden to the left. The gaps between the steps are to relieve uphill water accumulation and allow it between the steps. The Shade Garden is also the termination point form my wall drainage systems, and is the termination for the series of smaller dry creeks in the images above. It is in reality what was the natural flow course for millennia, until everyone started altering everything. Now we just respond and hope.


These are just ugly pictures of my seasonal stream flowing. There here if you want to see them:
http://smg.photobucket.com/user/MokePics2/library/New%20Place%20-%20Fallbrook/Storm-Runoff_Rear-of-Property?sort=3&page=1
My immediate neighbors suggest that it can be a gully washer. this flow is the result of an inch an hour, for an hour, with wet ground.
 
Lets go up the main dry creek,…..

This is where I terminated it. Its below an area where it can do damage to the house.
To this point, it has been working its way through a long diffuser system, intended to aerate, and slow the water coming downslope.
This is at the top of an access road on the side of the property. If I continued it, I would not be able to get my truck up into this area. So this is where i let it loose.
DSCN1559_zpscba398c3.jpg~original


I terminated the retaining wall into a spiral, so that the end of the dry creek, when flowing, would only impact the face of the wall, and not the rear side. So its a spiral end.
From here up is my main dry creek.

The dry creek is a series of dry-stacked formal planters and "natural" rip rap shoulders. It is intended to push water to where I need it to go, and to slow it down, and eliminate scouring.
Wherever an area is in question I built a planter, and armor plate the area with rocks. The planters are lined with erosion felt (real landscape felt), to prevent the flow from eroding the contents.


The area directly above the wall, on center, is where the seasonal stream enters.
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Upstream we go,..
 
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OK,.. we're just starting up the creek area. The dirt path directly in front is my access to the upper area with a wheelbarrow.
Directly in front is what Sarge and I call The Bridge.
The Bridge is a high shoulder that I created to create the downslope "bank" of the stream. I need to get upstream of this point with a wheelbarrow, so, The Bridge is an elevated smooth shoulder that I can cross into the creek with.
It is made up of rocks that are as thick as the depth necessary to create the shoulder (read large). The Bridge is about 10" tall.

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The Bridge, under construction:
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To the left of the bridge is where the main flow comes in at. I also have a less substantial secondary flow coming from neighbors property in this same area.
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Looking up the Main Fork:
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This is the top of the Main Fork, in construction. The entire bottom of the dry creek is made up of these size rocks, and depth. The planters on either side are lined with landscape felt, and backfilled with soil, to create a creek channel.
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So, how do I get the water into the crik?

up next,...
 
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Above this point, the top of the dry creek, I hauled dirt uphill, by the nearly endless wheelbarrow full, and used the backfill diggins from my trenches.
I hauled them up to the very top, and created a Headwall Collection Berm on my neighbors land, right at the interface with ours. The HeadWall Collector Berm ensures that water gets into my dry creek, and not ever again to be redirected towards the house.

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Lined with concrete wall caps, vertically oriented, and footed in concrete. Then chain link mesh pulled over the top, to trap the concrete plating. Then, granite boulders placed onto the chainlink to prevent it from moving. The backside is nailed down with a thousand landscape staples.
​Its all been covered in a thick fiberous mulch now, to prevent erosion.

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The headwall blocks all of the various flows that are developed in this area, and directs them to a spillway where it is collected, focuses it into my spillway:
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The low point of the spillway is the top of my dry creek. Thats how I get the water into it.
 
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More dry creek stacking, moving downstream:
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Creek overview, in construction:
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OK,… See that big old dead stump in the top image? That thing dies at least 50++ years ago, and was cut off. It is a stump from a huge old Eucalyptus tree that they used to use as windrows in orchards.
It was killed by erosion from this stream flow. We had a tree service come out and give us a bid on removing it.
We decided that we didn't dislike it as much as they wanted to remove it, $$$.


I finally went up and decided to have a look at doing it myself. I got a ladder out, and climb up.
I found it to be a hollow shell, all the way to the ground.
So, I grabbed my digging bar, and started opening it up even more. I opened it up enough that I got about ten wheelbarrows of soil into it, and hammered it down, and made it into a planter.
 
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Xeriscape talk again,....
The top is a Ponytail Palm; native to Texas, New Mexica, Arizona, northern Mexico, and the desert southwest. Its specialty is storing water reserves in a large bulbous base. They can handle severe extreme drought, and extreme temps at both ends of the scale.
It will grow a large base, and a stem that can reach over ten feet tall.
The vine is proving to be extremely hearty. It has handled freezing temps that lasted over a week, with a rare SoCal snow that stuck to the ground. It has grown over the top of the stump now, and is growing down the hot sunny face, which we didn't expect. It grows quite quickly, so, it seems like it might be transplantable to other stump planters that I have.
There are succulents that i've stuck in the north face of the stump, in cracks, that have hooked and are living without any soil. I also have some shade Aloes tucked into branch knots that are thriving on minimal soil up high.


So the old dead stump has been brought back to life.
 
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Before: Grapefruit:
This is just above the terminal end of the Main Fork. I had built this berm from dirt to try to anticipate this flow, and this project.

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After - From just above the grapefruit tree:
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Further back. The grapefruit tree is in the dry creek. Its just the way that it worked out:
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Now, I'm off to another affected area. This area is an area that at some point in natural time, did actually get this flow. But, allowing it to go this way puts it too close to aligning with problems with the house. So it is redirected around it now..
The area at the top of the Shade Garden was a scoured region, and we wanted to level it up, now that I've got my Main Fork in place.
Down lower in the yard, nearer the house, there has been an area where the stream would run towards the house. They tried to cut ditches and stuff (I'm finding out in archaeological fashion).
At any rate, they had made some attempts at fending the season flow back, but were amateurish at best. They did work, but presented other problems.
What it did do, was to trap water in the immediate area around the house; water that was generated by rain in that immediate area; roof offload, and immediate surrounding area. They just let the rain gutter flow into a puddle, and then allowed it to soak in.
Wrong approach!
Get the water away from the foundation; most critical.
So I dug a drainage trench across the rear of the house, and lined it with 4" perforated pipe, and trench lining, and backfilled with gravel to create a drain across the rear of the house, about 4' out from the house.
It needed to daylight at some point, which is where our building pad started to elevate from the natural terrain.
I put the outflow from a rainwater into this same drainage pipe, and have directed the outflow into this diffuser and birdbath, that i made to emulate a mountain stream, with step pools.

Here is a video of the not yet finished rain gutter mountain stream, actually sounding a bit like a stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HLdgBxfo5Q
 
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