Our house, a Sixties-Modern bungalow that might be described as “small box,” has a pretty pedestrian presentation on its windowless front or street face. Its back wall, in contrast, has huge floor-to-ceiling windows with wide views of a lovely, sloping yard down to an open field beyond. We really feel we live on that side, the garden side.. For years, probably decades, we talked vaguely of enhancing this back side with a deck. Then last fall we took tea with our friend Frank on his recently and professionally installed small bluestone patio. Seeing it inspired Joan to take dramatic unilateral action involving uncharacteristic extravagance. So just as winter was setting in she had Frank’s master masons install a patio here, and not all that small a one either. They finished as real winter arrived, so we were for some months in the rather weird situation of having this new outdoor “room, ” available but unusable and snow covered as we awaited spring. Spring did finally arrive, though, and the patio has revolutionized our lives. We have some bright annuals in flowerpots to doll it up a little, and we practically live there now, at least in sunny weather.
In a sense our beautiful patio is but the capstone of a garden that, if it is distinguished at all, is more notable for its geology than its botany. It is perhaps paradoxical that its finest features are a variety of rocks, but if you don’t have a green thumb you have to make do with a granite-colored one. I really like rocks and I really like found objects; and since rocks are among the more easily findable of objects, the rest was destiny. I decided quite soon after moving here that I wanted to construct a stone wall around the property’s periphery. You see some beautiful old walls throughout the local countryside, The reason there are so many old fieldstone houses in the northeast is that the farmers of the colonies and early republic kept damaging their plows on big, squarish rocks as they were plowing their fields. The topsoil of most of our state thinly covers huge masses of schist. This stuff has a natural tendency to break along a quite straight edge, at least on one side, and often ends up in almost regular rectangular form, making it highly suitable for walls, canal embankments, and the exteriors of domestic buildings. There is not so much agricultural plowing these days; but the rocks are still there, and are dug up in large numbers in almost any construction project.. I made a specialty of shopping malls under construction. The process sometimes requires displacing by dynamite and earth-moving behemoths a few hundred thousand cubic yards of lovely semi-ashlar rubble. If you are quick, audacious, crafty, and in a pickup, you can get there before the big trucks haul it off to the stone-crushing machines, And that is how I came by the wall that now surrounds most of our garden. I began modestly—at first I intended only to put up a low, decorative border to the driveway in the front of the house—but I then fell victim to mission creep.
I have a certain amount of difficulty in dating this Pharaonic project of wall-building with tolerable accuracy. It moved at a variable pace over a few years and involved the searching out, securing, transportation, and artistic repositioning of what I reckon at the very least to have been more than a hundred tons of Jersey field stone. But since every single stone was gathered by me and lifted or levered into the bed of a pickup truck, my automotive history gives me one solid date: 1993. That was the year I had at last to replace the 1963 gray-green Chevrolet pickup with a big maroonish Ford pickup, the first new vehicle I had ever owned. By that time the project was seriously advancing, though probably not yet at the halfway point. My Dad had had the Chevy on his farm in Arkansas and it was already battle-scarred from its previous heroic service when I acquired it and drove it East around 1970. What a truck! It can claim a nearly parental role in the raising of three great kids. This is not to disparage the Ford which, having enjoyed a comparatively gentler youth than the Chevy gave me loyal, uncomplaining service for more than a quarter of a century. But it is now gone too, alas, alas, and I must spend my last days pickupless.
Naturally I had been gathering other sorts of stones long before I began the wall. The one of which I am the proudest, and which has a history worthy of its own blog post one day, is a tolerably handsome cast cement statue of St. Anthony of Padua. It was in pretty good shape, if you overlook the decaitated Christ child. We sometimes call this statue “Frankie” in memory of the iconographic ignorance of the delightful friends who once kidnapped him and held him by that name for ransom under the misapprehension that he was Francis of Assisi. One trash collection day long ago (we were still living on University Place then), driving through a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of modest homes once mainly inhabited by Italian immigrants, I saw this statue thrown out at curbside. I actually thought it was plastic, and thus would nicely supplement the plastic pink flamingos already campily adorning our yard. It is, however, solid masonry. It was about all I could do to lift it and stagger to the truck’s tailgate. Just as I got it there I saw that I was being observed with what I must call astonishment by a woman two houses away. It was in fact Jeanne Stone, a formidable grande dame and spouse of the famous historian Lawrence Stone, my distinguished senior colleague. Over the years we became good friends with the Stones. The episode of my strange garbage collection was never mentioned.
A couple of other stone findings are of particular interest because I was actually able to include them in the wall. A good friend, once our neighbor on University Place, came by a rather macabre item among a miscellany of relics on his domestic property: part of a German grave marker. The inscription in the marble is “VATER”. God only knows where it came from or how it came to be where it came to be. I was able to incorporate it into a garden seat which I created at one end of a length of the larger wall. Above it I have a small statue, and this one really is Francis. My son-in-law, an Iraqi Jew, gave it to me—a fact adding to the cosmopolitan allure of this rustic corner of suburban New Jersey. Francis and I are both fathers, though of different sorts, Actually, I made a few of these seats, and have the materials for several more. They have their story too. The long pieces of slate forming the seat benches were once the treads in an old staircase going up the west end of McCosh Hall, where the English department is housed, on the Princeton campus. They were ripped out and cruelly thrown into dumpsters. They are noticeably worn down and smoothly grooved by the friction of the feet of thousands of students of several generations—very soothing to one’s bottom.
