Concrete blocks, fire bricks, big boulders.

This hard stuff doesn’t overtly seem to have much to do directly with gardening, but structure — often stone structure — seems so integral when it comes to creating spaces that are the bones of garden. Stone contributes so much to the physical and emotional sense of the garden, too. A rock is a rock to many people, but not to me.

If you have a stone path, you already know it makes you want to wander down it. If you’ve got rock walls, you already know they offer a sense of strength and permanence. And if you’re lucky enough to have those cool steps sliced from a single granite boulder, I want to come over!

I thought about this a lot yesterday as I lugged 230 firebricks from the driveway to the back patio, where construction is underway on my wood-fired bread and pizza oven. The oven itself is based on a basic design from “The Bread Builders,” a book that’s the inspiration for hundreds of backyard baking enthusiasts. North House Folk School in Grand Marais offers a class in how to construct an oven of this type, which I took last fall to better understand the process.

Imagine a wine barrel sliced in half lengthwise, and laid flat-side-down on a slab of concrete in the photo above.  Or think of a tunnel, where the hearth, where the bread will rest to bake, as the road. When it’s completed, it could look something like this one below.

The plan is to light a fire and let the firebricks soak up the heat until it’s between 700-900 degrees. At that temp, pizza will take about 3 minutes to cook. When the oven cools down to 500 or so, it will be ready to bake bread.

The oven’s footprint will only be about 4′ x 3′, but with a chimney, it can seem pretty tall. Also, there are already granite pavers, bluestone steppers and taconite boulders in the patio and water garden, where the oven is located. I want this structure to feel like it’s part of the surroundings, not dominate them.

So I’m still mulling over what to use to face the outside of the oven. Lake Street granite pavers on the bottom?  Stacked bluestone? Red brick pavers or multi-colored slate steppers, both of which I already have around and could use for free? Layers of each, or something completely different?

Have you seen good examples of stone used in the garden? Things I should definitely avoid? Do you have a kind of stone or use you really like? Where should I look for inspiration (please, suggest anywhere but Hedberg Landscape and Masonry Supplies, because I can spend hours there admiring different kinds of stone)? What would you do?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 9:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.