The MGS Forum
Gardening in mediterranean climates => Hard landscaping => Topic started by: John on June 27, 2011, 09:41:17 AM
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Prior to our Catalonia trip to visit gardens with the MGS UK branch I went to photograph wild flowers with Brian Constable. We also visited a British couple who had done their own garden landscaping. Though I generally dislike crazy paving I thought that this small scale version of it was very impressive. It used flat shards of slightly water worn pieces of rock and produced an almost flat surface which was very slip proof. The pieces are approximately 8 cm across.
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Sorry I am having a disaster with sorting out images for this. I only ever use Tiff's which the forum won't accept and for some reason my photoshop doesn't appear to have jpg's available. I tried sending it as a pdf but it has to be so small that it is very poor. I must investigate this!
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John, I'm sure you may save photos as jpgs in Photoshop, but you must change the mode first to 8 bits (Image>mode> choose 8 bits), you probably use 16 bits mode, then the jpg and many other formats will be available.
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Hopefully with Jorun's help I have resolved the image problem so here is the picture of the paving.
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...And light-coloured paving (like that in your photo) gets less hot than dark.
On that subject: denser material, such as compressed concrete slabs or basalt, may be harder wearing (not a hard a fast rule) but it also holds more heat; and given any particular thermal conductivity, that means it can feel hotter on your feet in summer (your feet will be less effective at cooling the stone). In fact, denser materials tend to have higher thermal conductivity, which makes matters worse. ...All from a summer perspective.
So the light coloured and relatively lightweight limestone is a cool choice, at it were.
One point to note with limestone: For paving, it is obviously preferable to have a rock which splits to give decent parallel sided stones. But if you pick one which is too well laminated, chances are it will be prone to splitting along the laminae of its own accord after you have laid it (especially after winter rains then summer scorching). That means your slabs will gradually erode, leaving shallow 'walls' of concrete pointing. Better to find limestone that has distinct thin beds (say 4-6cm thick) separated by localized laminae. That way, you'll get decent flat faces and solid paving stones.
No - don't ask me where to find such rock! Half the fun is in exploring (because you never know what you might find that you weren't looking for).
And water-worn, as in your photo, is useful because it is:
- gentler on the feet
- easier to sweep (perhaps)
- already tested for being over-laminated (if it had weak laminae, the water-wearing process would probably have split the rock already)
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An attractive and versatile form of paving is brick pavers interspersed with marble chips, and perhaps edge-on fragments of terracotta tiles. I first saw this at the Corfu house which used to be owned by Ghika (perhaps modern Greece's best painter), who himself designed and laid out all sorts of different paving there, including some in this brick-and-paving style. Our neighbour Laurie, herself an artist, was inspired by my snapshots of the Ghika version to do her own version, here in the UK. So she got to work with a load of pavers and cubic metre of marble chippings. I think it has transplanted well to our darker climate, bringing a touch of the Mediterranean to her garden (and it goes well with the local sandstone). This is a photo of one bit of Laurie's handiwork:
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While hard paving may be very beautiful it holds far too much daytime heat around the house to be comfortable. We have much preferred a minimum of hard paving and a maximum of softscaping around our house.
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What an interesting remark, Davey, on the existence of artificial microclimates.