No matter who wins the presidential election of 2016, there will be a wall. It will be strong, it will be solid, and no one under the height of 5 inches will be able to scale it.
They will, however, be able to walk around it and enter Lily’s garden. Such is Lily’s garden wall.
Lily’s garden wall is still in the process of being created (and is still unpainted). I’d imagined at first that I’d have it span the back and one side of her space (roughly 36″ long), and make it high enough that it would completely shield the garden from outside view (about 13″ high). But, I wanted to spend some time with just the hint of a wall, first, and then build it out as I saw what was needed. This is what it looks like right now, out in my garage workshop.
I’ll talk a bit more about this method of building next week, when I get back to my general discussion. It’s another one of Christopher Alexander’s architectural patterns, called gradual stiffening. (I wrote about openings to the street earlier). But today I want to talk about how wonderful the little blocks are that I use to build the wall.
They come from a site call Hirst Arts which sells molds for these individual blocks, and for most any other small building block you can imagine. There are molds for tiled floors, molds for building cathedrals, and molds for building dungeons. Here’s a page full of the various projects.
The process takes a little planning – you have to get the plaster, mix it up, and then spend an evening or two casting bricks and drying them. Fortunately, I had a big pile of them that I’d casted a few years ago, thinking I’d build that great hallway from Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.
So, I only had to find the right sized blocks and glue them together. Having now learned my lesson of not spending too much time on things that aren’t seen, I’m not going to build and actual wall behind the large garden structure. No one is ever really going to see that corner. But I do need a real wall in one corner, and that’s where the blocks come in handy.