How I Created a Landscape With Natural Stone

Creating a landscape with natural stone is not always easy.

This project required much forethought as to the stone landscaping ideas. The project had landscape retaining walls in various areas of the project, pool patio paving, walkway designs, and landscape steps. In addition, to make things more difficult, the house was brick. Luckily, the brick had interesting colors running through it which I could pick up on.

The first of the stone landscaping choices to be made was regarding the pool paving. Travertine pavers were chosen. Not only are they beautiful, but also cool on your feet, which is important for swimming pool paving. The travertine pavers were from the Andes Collection and the color was Manchester. Although Manchester is a basically a tan color, it is not solid and has darker and lighter tones along with camel. It looked great with the brick and existing concrete aggregate walkway, which was in the same color tones. We used the London pattern which is made up of relatively large sizes.

The stone selection for the landscape retaining walls was the next step. The walls ranged in size from 18" to 36" high. Therefore, I knew I wanted somewhat of a larger stone size. I also decided to mix some boulders into the wall as I love this look.

Upon visiting the stone yard, I found a stone that was perfect. It was gray with tans mixed in it. (This stone yard called it "Mountaineer".)There was to be a waterfall at the pool with large boulders, so the gray would look good with this and also complimented the travertine color. The tan picked up on the travertine so that everything blended nicely.

The same stone was used for the risers of the landscape steps One continuous piece of bluestone was used for each tread. The bluestone looked nice with the gray of the stone and also with the travertine.

Along the side of the house was an area to be leveled out for a batting cage for the boys. This required two retaining walls, but since it was not very visual and also a functional area, I felt it was unnecessary to landscape with natural stone here due to the cost. So I chose a Versa-Lok wall which is colored concrete blocks. However the blocks are different sizes so as to mimic stone. This was the Mosaic pattern and the color was Chestnut Blend. Once again the block was gray with tan running through it.

To summarize this landscape with natural stone, we used travertine pavers for the pool paving in the Manchester (tan) color, Mountaineer stone for the landscape retaining walls (gray and tan), Mountaineer stone for the risers of the landscape steps with bluestone treads, and Versa-Lok Mosaic concrete wall block in Chestnut Blend for the functional walls on the side of the property.

This was a lot of work....but looks great. So take your time in choosing and coordinating when landscaping with stones. Bring samples to your project to make sure colors and textures look well together. Hold the various landscape stones next to each other to make sure you like the combinations.

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