Students of stone build tranquility one rock at a time-The Toronto Star
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The Toronto Star Sep. 23, 2004. 01:00 AM

Seminar teaches how to construct dry stone walls Satisfaction comes from thinking with your hands

A groan, a grunt, a pleasing thud and sighs of satisfaction. These are the sounds of a stone wall being built.

A group of 18 people are gathered just off Mississauga Road near Belfountain, lugging and slugging rocks in a workshop on how to build a dry stone wall.

"It's an illusion that building a stone wall with flat rocks is easier," John Shaw-Rimmington tells the participants, who have each come for the one-day workshop.

Rimmington started the Dry Stone Wall Association of Canada (http://www.dswac.ca) because he passionately believes that most people are capable of building their own walls, and do not need to pay a professional to do it.

Dignified, poetic, noble, stone walls make any landscape or garden look a thousand times more beautiful.

The group is working with lots of round rocks, from boulders to pieces the size of potatoes. It is the type of granite deposited by glaciers over much of southern Ontario.

A dry stone wall is simply a freestanding wall without mortar — well built, it can last more than 100 years.

Gayle Jeffery of Rockwood is taking the course because she has the same type of stone on her country property. Rimmington watches her work and thinks she's a natural.

"I'm probably the slowest one here," Jeffery says as she paces the wall, looking for exactly the right spot to place her stone. "It's a puzzle, I like to fiddle with it."

Building a dry stone wall is a process, an event, Rimmington says, an opportunity to think with the hands and meditate. It is so satisfying, he predicts it will soon explode as the next do-it-yourself obsession.

Mo Solomon of Norval admits to being obsessed with stone.

"I'd feel confident building a wall after this course," he says.

When the wall near Belfountain is finished, it will be 1.2 metres tall, a metre wide at the base and tapering in at the top.

"You can prepare a six-inch (15 cm) gravel base, but you can also build it right on the ground," says Rimmington. "The whole theory is that the wall is built to move with the frost."

He's not a fan of using heavy equipment to build stone walls.

"That ignores the relationship to stone. People knit it together, time has to be taken to slow down," he says. "It has taken millions of years for stone to form, people should respect that time frame and then building with it will be therapeutic."

The granite used in the workshop is about $40 a ton. The cheapest stone according to Rimmington is riprap, or gabion stone, the kind enclosed in wire and used for retaining walls. But even that should be valued he says jokingly. "It's wrong to cage stone, I would like to cut the wires and let it all loose."

During a break, Rimmington talks about the legendary British artist Andy Goldsworthy, and the spectacular wall he designed and helped build at the Storm King Art Centre (http://www.stormking.org) in Mountainville, N.Y. More than 600 metres long, it meanders through a forest and into a pond.

In October, Rimmington will be bringing over two world-class wallers from Scotland to construct a dry stone footbridge. They will be working at the Dry Stone Walling festival in Port Hope Oct. 9-12.

During the festival, there will be hands-on seminars and other displays. To register, email the association at shaw-rimmington@sympatico.ca.

Information is available on the www.dswac.ca website about future workshops
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Kathy Renwald is head of creative development at the Royal Botanical Gardens as well as producer and host of Gardener's Journal on HGTV Sundays, Mondays and Saturdays at 5.30 a.m. She is a Master Gardener and co-author of Annuals for Ontario, Perennials for Ontario and Tree and Shrub Gardening for Ontario. E-mail gardenersjournal@sympatico.ca

Submitted by KATHY RENWALD