Landscaping Rocks Blog

“You can’t buy experience.” That saying holds true when it comes to working with natural stone. While buying from a quality natural stone retailer will provide the very best raw materials to work with, the actual effort involved in landscaping with stone retaining walls or crafting beautiful natural stone interiors requires the experience to get the best out of the material, avoid mistakes and select the best natural stone for the job.

You can’t buy your own experience, but you can employ someone with that experience to work for you. With that in mind, experience is a key ingredient in the mix of criteria you need to look at when you decide to employ a natural stone layer. In today’s service-oriented professional environment it’s easy to get dazzled by personality and superficial results. While someone may have a reputation for quick work and a polite demeanour, the quality of the end result is what matters. You want someone with a reputation for solid work above everything else.

That’s why it’s always a good idea to ask for references when it’s time to hire a professional stone layer. When you follow up on these references you can ask past clients how their work has held up under everyday wear and tear and how they feel about the job’s quality after the fact. This will give you an idea of whether the natural stone layer’s results stand the test of time, and whether there’s substantial skill behind that first impression.

A skilled natural stone layer also knows how to create beautiful work that fits in with the style you desire. Ask for a portfolio of past work. Ask yourself if it demonstrates versatility across a range of jobs and natural stone types, and whether any particular example especially appeals to you. This will not only let you know if the contractor is right for you, but help you firm up your own ideas about the job you want done.

Once you’ve found the right candidate for the job, act fast, as skilled professionals in natural stone laying are rare. The best professionals will often be booked months in advance, so it’s a good idea to schedule your job as soon as possible, but set a realistic date weeks or months down the road. For outdoor natural stone work such as paths, stone retaining walls and other landscaping jobs, remember that demand spikes through Spring and Summer. Natural stone interiors don’t depend on the weather but will be affected by the demand for outdoor jobs, since expertise often crosses over.

Our natural stone showroom includes examples of professional grade natural stone work as judged by Mike Stone, informed by his decades of experience. Visit us and we can tell you more about how to find a natural stone layer with valuable experience, and the quality you should expect from these professionals.

Tags: English, Fieldstone, Flagstones, Granite Stone, Landscaping Rocks by mike
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Homeowners, landscapers and even architects will forget landscaping basics from time to time. It isn’t enough to just be technically proficient laying granite stone and other landscaping rocks, or to only provide a solid set of stone walls. A quality landscaping job needs to look balanced – in other words, its elements need to work together to both look good and make it easy for people to enjoy in a practical sense.

Over my years building stone retaining walls, stone patio features, doing general landscaping and acting as a stone retailer and wholesaler who advises landscapers, I’ve come to appreciate the difference a balanced landscape makes to appearance and usability.

For example, imagine if your driveway goes up to the centre of your property, possibly to end in a roundabout or take a “U” shape in front of the main entrance. On a sizable property, just clustering everything by the entrance makes it look too busy, so you’ll have to landscape either side of the driveway.

If you build up one side with retaining walls surrounding an extensive garden, with stone steps leading up, while leaving the other side with nothing but some trees and driveway-level flower beds your landscape will look imbalanced from the front, both in terms of how developed each side is, and by relative level. Practically speaking, your guests have to cross the driveway to enjoy either open space or get to the garden, which is a nuisance.

If you built up a mix of garden space and open recreational space on either side, you can enjoy both sides and keep traffic over the driveway to a minimum. You don’t need to make both sides exactly the same, but ask yourself this: Do both sides attract my eyes equally? Is there any one location I would never go to because it looks bare or is annoying due to a slope or poor sign lines?

The important thing is the overall view and practical comfort, which should attract you on all sides and blend naturally from any direction, so there’s always something interesting to see, and you don’t feel “blocked” from a particular feature. Take care that a focal point like a trees or stone isn’t so dominating that it causes the imbalance. Sometimes, on particularly “loud” feature is all it takes to throw your landscape off kilter.

Come up to out landscaping stone showroom and talk to us. We can advise you how different varieties of landscaping stone can help you provide balance to your property through properly placed stone walls, flagstone steps and patios, and more. We have the experience on staff to answer your questions and look forward to hearing from you.

Tags: English, Flagstones, Granite Stone, Landscaping Rocks, Retaining Walls by mike
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High maintenance properties are show pieces. They’ve got abundant flower beds, rock gardens, water features, flowering shrubs and trees, often arranged across multiple levels and combined with stone retaining walls and other stone landscaping features. The result can be breathtaking, but without regular management weeds, erosion and general neglect can make them extremely unattractive. That’s why they’re called “high maintenance properties.”

Two types of people are interested in high maintenance properties. The first group is financially capable of carrying the expenses inherent in keeping up the property. They can hire maintenance teams to do the watering, pruning, planting, mowing and other chores required to maintain the property’s spectacular appearance. The wealthiest property owners can afford to buy expertise so they’ll have people on hand who can, for example, recommend Penn Blue sandstone for a path or decorative wall.

The other typical owner is a retired, semi-retired or a dedicated workaholic (I’m in that last category) who wants to constantly work on the property. He enjoys it as a hobby, or is a landscaping professional who wants to demonstrate his skills on his own real estate. One of the advantages here is that if you do it yourself, you’ll be able to explore your own ideas thoroughly, instead of describing them in vague terms for a contractor to interpret. If you imagine a hardscape that uses a certain type of granite stone, for example, you can make it happen – as long as you learn the correct skills.

No matter which category belong to, choosing high maintenance properties can, once you apply the right mindset, help you relax, even if you’re taking on a substantial amount of work to develop the land into something you’ll love – and that’s because you will love it. The great thing about these projects is that you are ultimately investing in yourself. It’s your land and your dreams taking shape, so as the project continues your ideas will take you down unexpected paths – a stone retaining wall with a particular bend, shrubs where you didn’t expect them, and other examples of creativity born from your own ideas and the practical aspects of working with the land. That special relationship between your dreams and the real earth and stone of landscaping, creates genuine beauty that is definitely worth the effort.

Tags: English, Granite Stone, Retaining Walls by mike
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My wife Sue and I would like to welcome home owners, landscapers, architects, stone masons and retailers to our store and show room at 570 Knowlton Road, Lac Brome , Qc. Canada. I have, as of this year, been working in the stone and landscape trade for 40 years! With over 3 1/2 acres of natural stone we have one of the largest selections of landscape and building stone in Quebec.  Deliveries are usually within 24 hours or the same day.  The coffee is always on and our expert staff would be pleased to answer your questions and make sure your order(s) go out on time .
Mike Stone / President

Tags: English, Fieldstone, Flagstones, Granite Stone, Landscaping Rocks, Retaining Walls, Sand Stone by mike
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