We’ll assume this story is apocryphal because I can’t source it beyond Jeff and I talking about it. If it’s not apocryphal I’m likely mangling details so we’ll just consider it an illustrative ‘maybe’:
When architects were designing sidewalks at UC Berkeley, they observed the natural paths made by students going from building to building, class to class, living their lives, and then designed the sidewalks to conform to the habits they revealed. That’s what’s happening up top–those are the patterns we made on the way into the woods in the winter, and a secondary path leading to the left into the shade grove/garden.
The land is flat at first and then curves down into the woods, becoming compacted in the summer when we walk into the woods with the dogs, and then an icy sheet of mud in the winter. Erosion does its thing.
I did the first flagstone path, just laying the stones on top of the ground, then sinking them, and Jeff thought it was not quite right and rearranged into the stones into a straight line. Reader, I married him I was right and he was wrong.
The curved path is a better fit with the natural curves. The kitchen garden (invisible, to the right) is a rectangle, and I’m never completely pleased with it. Imagine right angles in the middle of the woods. It’s just wrong, but I can’t quite face the idea of creatively redoing it. There are trees out there that need planting.
The routine for figuring it out in the end went like this: we put the flagstones on top of the path and just walked on them for a while, to see how they felt. Then, when one of us could face it, we sank them, with no underlying base material. Then we would move them around, do another draft. Crowbar them up, redig, reset, replant.
Watched them disappear into the earth as we waited for seasons to pass, time to figure it all out.
Finally a week or two ago I sank them in their permanent places, using a layer of drainage rock followed by sand and then moving them around and tapping them into place.
So: seasons of study, iteration, and a few rounds of backbreaking labor separated by six months to a year, minimum, because I don’t know who can handle prying up forty flagstones with a crowbar every few months but that person is not me.
Letting them sink into the ground did create an underlying compacted area that could then be raised with rock and sand, keeping them flush with the ground and lawnmower-friendly–and it let gravity do some of the work for us.
Here’s a final, fuzzy product through the screen in Jeff’s office.
