Piedra China

We found a great deal offering one lot of piédra chína, numbering around forty hefty and heavy blocks of dense, raw stone yet naturally polished over hundreds of years. They are of similar sizes but are all uneven; no two pieces are exactly alike. Some are squarish, some have slants. Some have a tinge of pink, while some have longer and shorter sides.

It was both challenging and exhausting to lay them out! I wanted them to look randomly,  naturally in place, as if it has always been there, organically part of the landscape. It has a very practical purpose: I needed to connect the entrance driveway through the muláwin gate all the way to the cabáňa with a solid pathway as it always gets either dusty or muddy to walk through.

It was extremely back-breaking to establish a pattern, through trial and error, with stones as heavy as tree trunks! Not only are they uneven (above left and right), I also needed to make the path curve as gracefully and effortlessly as possible.

Their thicknesses also vary widely, so the depths we had to dig to make the finish with an even surface was different for each piece! In the end (below), all the hard labor paid off with a handsomely paved walkway gracing our garden's foyer.