How To Create A Beautiful Garden Using Natural Stones

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

How to create a beautiful garden using natural stones

The Yakovlev family won the most prestigious competition of the year "Gardener-2005", announced by the Russian Union of Gardeners. Their plot in the Pavlovskoye-1 horticultural non-profit partnership (Pushkinsky district of St. Petersburg) was recognized as the best of the thousands of the best, announced for the competition. At the Golden Harvest festival at the Oktyabrsky Big Concert Hall, the Yakovlevs were awarded the main prize - the keys to the Oka car. This is their first car.

The best summer cottage of the season looks like a medieval fortress from the outside - with a tower, loopholes, a moat (stylized drainage ditch), a humpbacked bridge. The architectural concept, according to the head of the family, Igor Alekseevich, was inspired by his childhood hobbies when he was building sand castles. Years later, when their own children left the sandbox long ago, the dream became a reality. It was personally embodied by his wife Vera Valentinovna. Having no specialty in construction, she found design solutions for her husband's ideas and even did the laying of walls.

In the construction they used a natural stone - cobblestone. He was collected in the surrounding fields and transported in a wheelbarrow. Igor Alekseevich even had his own norm - three cars a day. Also, glass bottles were collected for the manufacture of bottle concrete. This is the same building material as, say, reinforced concrete or foam concrete, only ordinary bottles are mixed into it.

Igor Alekseevich explained the physics of the object: the coefficient of expansion of glass and sand is the same, so the bottles are very organically combined with the solution. They create volume (they are mixed in whole - author's note), due to which heat is better retained with an economical use of the solution, which is very important for a family with an average income. The cellar under the tower is built entirely of bottle concrete. And the house is made of timber. Its outer walls are faced with stone, and the inner ones are clapboard.

All buildings are dominated by natural material. House area 45 sq. It has three small rooms (one of them is in the tower) and a living room, which serves as both a kitchen and a dining room. In addition to the stove, it has a fireplace. It is faced with the same stone from the fields. The fireplace and stoves were laid out by Vera Valentinovna according to the drawings from the book. She designed and designed interior interiors. They are refined in their simplicity, rational, and distinctive. Instead of wallpaper, the hostess used chintz. The fabric does not require perfectly flat walls, does not deform from temperature extremes and harmoniously fits into the dacha coloring. The everyday life of needlework is decorated with drawings made by women and children of the Yakovlev's creative family. Vera Valentinovna is a jack of all trades. In the House of Children's Creativity, she directs a puppet theater, for which, together with the pupils, makes scenery, puppets.

Daughter Anna graduated from the Lyceum of Traditional Culture, she owns painting on wood. She is now studying at the Pedagogical University. Son Alexander is fond of forging. His hobbies are knightly armor, armor, swords. Sasha is studying at the St. Petersburg Agrarian University. Parents say that his hands are golden, and in the country he is an indispensable assistant. The father of the family humbly defines himself as "brute physical strength".

The keeper of the hearth is literally Vera Valentinovna's mother, Anna Petrovna Mikhailova. She lives in the country all year round. In winter, he stokes the stoves, clears paths from snow, walks with the dog Zhakonya. And grandmother is also the main gardener. In her 80s, she is digging, watering and weeding garden beds. Anna Petrovna considers herself a happy grandmother.

At the beginning of the 90s it was she who received the plot in the gardening "Pavlovskoye-1". There was practically no land on the area overgrown with bushes - solid clay. We created the fertile layer ourselves. From the ditches they carried soil, from the forest - peat, fallen leaves. After weeding, the grass is folded on the paths.

The construction began from the tower. They put a frame made of reinforcement, cut down a wooden turret, built a cellar under it, and added a bathhouse. And only after that they started building the house. The construction took three years. We worked ourselves in our free time. The fortress house occupies less than a hundred square meters. It stands on the edge of the site, with a blank wall to the street, and in this place a fence is not needed.

The dacha is made in the same style, dictated by the presence of natural stone. When designing landscape design, the preferences of family members were taken into account. Igor Alekseevich loves to take a steam bath in the Russian bath and after the steam room plunge into the hole, so the pond was placed near the bath. He dug it by hand himself. At a depth of 2.5 meters, the shovel hit hard rock. The removed clay was laid over the tower at the level of the cellar, additionally insulating it. The size of the pond is 7 x 3.5 x 2.5 m. A well was drilled and filled with water. Soon the pond took on a life of its own. Reeds have grown, algae, water bugs and other inhabitants of reservoirs have started up. We launched carp, and they live there now.

On the perimeter of the pond, women planted irises, astilbe, hosts … In winter, an ice-hole is made in the reservoir, into which the owner plunges after the bathhouse. This is the practical application of the pond, perhaps, limited. Its main purpose is decorative. A barrel with a capacity of 250 liters is used for irrigation. It is filled from the well once a week. Additionally, rainwater is collected from the roof of the house. It flows down a drainpipe into a beautiful dummy well trimmed with stone. A barrel is disguised inside it. The paths are paved with stone and the washbasin is laid out. Vera Valentinovna also plans to build a barbecue from stone and decorate the walls of the garage, under which the existing barn will be converted.

Everything that is on the unique site of the Yakovlevs is manual, piece work. Admiring her, you understand that it is not at all necessary to be rich in order to make a paradise out of your summer cottage. It is enough, and maybe even better, to have a rich creative imagination and an indefatigable desire to embody it. Holders of such a gift do not need to go to the store and contact professional designers. They will discern the material in a dump of unnecessary things and make a "candy" out of it. The pergola entwined with maiden grapes, it turns out, is made of arcs found in a dump. The openwork porch railings are adapted racks from the old-fashioned Kaiser sewing machine …

There is a division of labor in the family. Everyone does what he likes. Anna Petrovna is gardening. Vera Valentinovna prefers decoration. She grows only tomatoes from vegetables - she succeeds. The tomatoes ripen on the vine from July to September. Vera Valentinovna places them in a stationary greenhouse built from old window frames.

A small part of the plot is reserved for the traditional set of vegetables. One hundred square meters are given for potatoes, and its harvest is enough for the whole winter. The collection of fruit and berry crops are: pears, apple trees, plums, currants, honeysuckle.

Ornamental plants dominate in the country. Conifers grow beautifully: thujas, spherical cypresses, junipers, blue spruce, pines. And fashionable shrubs: holly mahonia, rhododendron, all kinds of cinquefoil, tree hydrangea, honeysuckle, roses … The collection of perennial flowers has exceeded a hundred. From spring to late autumn, the garden is buried in flowers growing on rocky hills, in mixborders, wherever there is free space.