Stone Garden
Among the many hallmarks of Emily's work is her inclusion of interior gardens.
Sometimes they work. The garden in the Wilson cottage succeeds because Paul and Margaret work hard to maintain it. Shame might goad them into making the effort — the garden forms the principal entryway to the cottage.
However, ours failed; it did not get adequate light and had no drainage. It was where plants were sent to die. It became an attractive nuisance; the dogs discovered that it was an excellent place to dig and redistribute the soil to all of the parts of the cottage that needed it. This summer we accepted our failure and decided to try an alternative. I first excavated all of the earth from the enclosure and dumped it into the raised-bed garden. I then designed, cut stone for, and installed a stone garden to replace Emily's. We wanted something that would evoke the garden that Emily might have had in mind — green growth against dark earth.
The design inscribed a large golden rectangle into the right triangle of the garden opening and then inscribed smaller golden rectangles into the three resulting right triangles.
This is what it looks like from above and the side.
It now serves as a walkway between the entryway and the kitchen.
The central golden rectangle is green labradorite from Madagascar, the magic feldspar that glows from within. (It forms the cross in the Cross for Saint Brendan.) The splashes of gold and lavender are reflections off calcic lamina deep in the stone spaced less than an ultraviolet wavelength apart.
The side golden rectangles are of Costa Esmeralda epidote gneiss (usually mistakenly called "granite").
