Dry Stone Retaining Wall

In August 2002, on my vacation, Melissa and I built a stone wall. Melissa laid most of the courses of stone, I laid most of the gravel and handled all of the demolition and digging.  We decided that we wanted a wall that looked more natural than many of the newer walls, so we shied away from the squared-off stone and the fabricated bricks.  This did two things for us

• It looks more "natural".  This is something Melissa really wanted.
• The wall has lots of little nooks where toads and skinks can live (we get a lot of toads in the driveway and skinks around the house in the summer)
• It saved us a ton of money.  The squared-off and common thickness stones are much more expensive than the rough multi-sized ones we picked up
• We found some shell fossils in the stones :-)

Here is a photo of the wall as it existed when we bought the house.  It was built using standard pressure-treated garden timbers held down by large spikes.

You would never have guessed from the photo above that the garden timbers were completely rotten and infested with about the largest colony of carpenter ants I have ever seen!  The inside of the timbers were completely disintegrated. Since the timbers were pressure-treated, it was important to dispose of them properly.  Our local landfill collection area has special bins for pressure-treated lumber.  You should never dispose of pressure-treated wood by treating it like you would normal wood.  Pressure-treated wood has hazardous chemicals in it that kill wildlife as well as pollute the ground water.  Always wear gloves when handling pressure-treated wood, and a breath mask if you care cutting it.

Here's the load of wallstone that it took to complete this wall

Here's a couple fossil imprints we found in one of the stones

All the timbers have been removed, and a small base of 1/2" blue stone gravel has been put down in a shallow undercut to help with drainage, weeds and freezing damage.  The earth was also angled up and away from the wall as best as I could without damaging any of the nearby plants.

Here the second course of stones has been laid, and the area behind them backfilled with the 1/2" blue-stone gravel  The gravel helps seat the wall stones, but more importantly, provides a barrier against erosion and water damage.

Here the wall is complete in the corner, barring some touch-up later on. The highest point of the wall is in the 90 degree inside corner in the left third of the photo.  It tapers off in both directions from there.

Here is an evening picture of about 3/4 of the wall. The completed wall used four half-pallets of flat stones and one ton of blue stone 1/2" gravel.

Here is a nice photo of the wall from April 2003, right after Melissa used the leaf blower to clean off the driveway of all the tree pollen and other debris.  The wall extends further on towards the camera.  The stones have weathered a pretty severe winter quite well, and any that did fall (due to overly aggressive shoveling or plowing, heh) were very easy to reseat due to the complete lack of any mortar. We've already noticed some skinks and toads living inside the pockets between the stones :-)