I love open faced stone walls. I also love secret gardens, and this is what stone walls make me think of, even if they don't surround a locked up garden. This may be something to do with the fact that in Australia, mostly things are new, and we are not surrounded by stone as some are in Europe and the UK in particular.
We have three stone walls in our garden, two for sitting on and one which is over the pond and water runs down it (when we are allowed to use water, that is, which is mainly never, although the water regulations don't really talk about water walls, ponds and creeks, probably because noone is crazy enough to have them, so technically we can probably run it all the time).
Different stones were used for each wall.
The last one is a kind of reddish ochre, which is a little bit reminiscent of the amazing small tiled surface of the main part of Federation Square in Melbourne (below), where the stone came from the Kimberley in the Northern Territory.
Look at the amazing range of colours in this stone, ranging from grey to whitish to pink and all shades of red and umber. The space covered by these tiles is huge and it undulates, like a natural surface. One of the things which makes it so interesting is that the tiles are small, that is, about 20 cm square, rather than the more common large paver size.
I love Federation Square so much. I am not alone in this of course. For all the criticism at the time about the cost and how long it took to build, only an utterly obssessed and perfectionist architect and an excellent collaborative builder could have got this level of detail so right. Below are some images from the Fed Square website.
We went there recently for the Barbie exhibition (sorry Mattel, my skills don't permit the insertion of a little 'r' in a circle after her name) and even my daughter was impressed by the stone expanse.
I digress, but for the record, my favourite Barbie is the Superstar Barbie. The exhibition itself was fantastic although I suspect I enjoyed it more than my daughter. But something wierd - all the Ken dolls were in a separate room. What is that about?
