![\"This](\"http:\/\/glenvillaartgarden.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/before.jpg\")
<\/a>This view shows the driveway and the parking area in front of the house. The house itself is out of the frame to the right.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Now it looks like this.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Stones in gabion baskets create a more interesting wall that better suits the architecture of the house.<\/p><\/div>\n
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We built the\u00a0drystone wall that appears in the ‘before’\u00a0picture a few years after\u00a0we moved into Glen Villa. We needed a wall because we had cut into the hillside to create enough space for parking, and a stone wall was an obvious choice since stone walls\u00a0appear in many places at Glen Villa.<\/p>\n
There are tall ones….<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Glen Villa is built on a hillside and this wall is part of the foundation of the house. There is a terrace on top of the wall, one story higher than the ground floor room on the right of this photo.<\/p><\/div>\n
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and short ones.<\/p>\n
<\/a>This wall formed part of the foundation for a summer cottage, torn down in the late 1960s when our house was built.<\/p><\/div>\n
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There are old\u00a0ones…<\/p>\n
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<\/a>This low wall, now held together by a stone coping, dates from 1902 when Glen Villa Inn was built. It is the wall around the Yin\/Yang.<\/p><\/div>\n
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and new ones.<\/p>\n
<\/a>This wall is part of The Aqueduct, a project finished last year.<\/p><\/div>\n
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There are walls that draw\u00a0your eye, others that almost disappear, attractive walls\u00a0and ones that don’t look so great. The parking wall was one of the latter. The wall needed to be repaired — stones were starting to fall off and the wall starting to bulge from the weight of the earth behind it. Worst, though, was the mismatch between the strong straight architectural lines of the house and the rough workaday character of the wall itself.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>One end of the parking wall abutted a stone outcropping. An unattractive little wall was above it and a pathetic bed I used to trial\u00a0plants was beside it.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Several years ago we began work on The Aqueduct, an area below the driveway that adjoins the house. This multi-purpose project took several years and involved replacing dangerous steps, changing the shape of the land and transforming\u00a0a hidden stream into a major feature of the garden. It also involved building a tall\u00a0stone wall. After investigating various options, we decided to build the wall using gabion baskets.<\/p>\n
A gabion basket is simply a heavy wire container which can be filled with almost any material. You sometimes\u00a0see the baskets filled with rubble along highways, holding back banks of earth.\u00a0They aren’t very appealing when stones are dumped in randomly, but when the\u00a0front layer of stones is carefully placed, a gabion wall has a clean neat appearance that I like very much.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Stones partially fill two of the many gabion baskets used in The Aqueduct.<\/p><\/div>\n
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When we decided to replace the drystone wall by the parking area rather than repair it, building a\u00a0gabion wall like the one at The Aqueduct was an easy choice. Although it is hard to\u00a0see both walls at the same time, I knew that repeating the same style would add continuity to the garden and link\u00a0one area to another.<\/p>\n
The new wall is practical — the parking area is about 2 feet wider now which means cars can make a three-point turn to back out . Because it is higher, you can see the wall from inside your car; this means you know how close to the wall you can park.<\/p>\n
The new wall is attractive. \u00a0Its\u00a0clean lines suit the modernist\u00a0architecture of the house much better than the old one.\u00a0It suits my aesthetic much better, too.<\/p>\n
<\/a>The wall follows the slope of the hillside. As the hillside rises, the wall becomes taller.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Enlarging the parking area exposed more of the\u00a0naturally beautiful\u00a0rock outcropping that marks the end of the space. I wanted to integrate the gabion baskets into\u00a0the curving top of that rock, to give the sense that one grew\u00a0naturally from the other. Making a clean join between the two meant that the bottom side of\u00a0several\u00a0baskets had to be cut and shaped individually. That\u00a0\u00a0took time.<\/p>\n
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