Posts Tagged "hardscaping"

Raising Cobbles After Years of Sinking in an Eroding Urban Garden

I’m very happy to be doing a complete overhaul of a small urban garden of a two family home on a busy street in Boston. The paint colors of the house are very inspiring and I am purposely choosing bloom colors that will POP against it. The garden is on a very steep slope, which will actually show off the plant choices quite well, but presents a problem with the mulch over-running the low cobble barrier.

I hadn’t planned on doing anything to the cobbles, but when I was weeding I realized how big they actually were! So I went down the line raising each about and inch and a half, which will alleviate to mulch erosion a wee bit.

Sometimes gardening is like accidental archaeology. In my digging I find clues and artifacts of the past. In this case I found that these cobbles weren’t set in a compacted permeable medium like gravel or stone dust, so they sank into the earth as the soil compacted over time. I also learned that the concrete sidewalk had been poured (or perhaps re-poured) since the cobbles had been installed, because the last 5 stones I has to hit with a sledgehammer to dislodge them from the sidewalk’s edge.

Archaeology aside, I’m excited about the future of this little garden