The Avant Garden

and a few things in the Avant Garden have taken a beating, but a few new things sprang up as well. Remember last time I said I had heard of most of the folks in the stonefoundation.org  article on The Art of Balancing Stones and I copied from them? After seeing Peter Reidel's entry on page 43, I decided to copy it:
It's about six feet tall on the uphill side.

 Soon after I got started, I began asking Rob to stand back and judge the triangles -- which I felt were a more important part of the construction than the stones. This Christmas-tree like thing was was spontaneously piled up on Easter from what I had on hand. One of these days I want better rocks for crisper triangles.

 My neighbors went outta town and needed a pet sitter. They left me a rockpile as payment. Over the course of four days, some of them rather rainy, many prime rocks were stacked, starting with this:               
Hope they go away again soon! 

I did another three-legged arch, one of only two I have, but the photo was indecipherable (haha), so I didn't include it.

The Downstream Rockpile, on the other side of the little river park in my neighborhood, is the home of the Burning Stacks of Fire, a ring of arches on a mess of different surfaces. It has been broken for a long time. I fixed it, though the photograph is difficult to decipher (haha):
It's all connected again, with highlights.

 The River is quite low right now, and I mined some of last summer's stones from the River to make this:
It's more of a "P" than anything else.

Remember I mentioned ace photographer Ewart Ball III retired and I gave him a rockstack as a gift? He sent a photo, with his Harley in the back:
Ewart's camera shows the detail in the rocks .

That's a nice collection of rocks in the Ball stack. Rob threw in a few, if I recall.

A guy is coming over tomorrow to shoot some video of me stacking. I've saved a large selection of repair projects, including Rob's Arch XIX, for him to film for our local public access TV channel, URTV. I don't know what all will become of this, but I hope I don't cuss or burp or worse, because he says he is going to put a cordless mic on me. In a sense, it sort of violates the "no stacking to show off" provision of the Prime Directive, but he asked so nicely, I couldn't say no.

It took me three years to let the newspaper I work for write a story ("Magazine notices local stone-stacker",(AC-T, April 15), about my rocks. The best part was the photo gallery, though if you read this blog regularly, like I do, then you've most likely seen 'em all.

18 days into Spring, to be exact. I came home from an early-morning shopping trip to find my son Matt had summed it up quite well:
Fresh mouth on that kid, aye? Learned it from his mother.
 

Out in the Avant Garden Proper, however, there was an air of excitement. Rollins, named after the great HenryRollins, looked more defiant than usual:
I hope one of these days Henry himself will come pose for a photo beside Rollins.

The Serpent Madonna with Child went for a "walk" in the snow:

Rob's Rockmobile (one of two in the Avant Garden) held a little snow over the River:
A favorite among the kayaking set .... 

 The rarely-seen Arch on Pedestal in the Meditation Garden looked even more peaceful:  

The biggest news of the week is that stonefoundation.org  has released the new issue of its magazine, Tektonika, featuring stone balancers. And somehow, snuck in there at the very end with some of the coolest rock manipulators of them all:

Jean Felice Ceprano , Bill Dan, Stephen Goulet, Elizabeth Foley/Len Othick, Jonas Jongblut, Daliel Leite, Deva Manfredo, Jim Needham, Peter Riedel, and of course, Zach Pine, is Dave Russell, our very own Avant Gardener. How'd that happen?

The very day I set this blog up, I linked to the Web sites of Bill Dan (through Daliel Leite), Jim Needham and Zach Pine because they were already adept at what I wanted to do.  Stephen Goulet is a legend. The others I have seen during my searches through Google Images on "stacked stones" and "balanced rocks," etc. and I have copied from them all. To be included in the photo exhibition with them was beyond cool. It inflated my ego so much I went out in the River and put an arch on top of Lighthouse, so now I call this Lighthouse Arch:
Tallest thing I have in the River at the mo' ...

If you click on this  PDF here:
StoneFoundation

and scroll to the end, there are two of my photos and some poorly written and edited verbiage (all my fault; the folks at Stonexus put out a very good print product) about rocks-n-things.  

Trout season opened to three inches of snow yesterday. We awoke Easter morning to a low of 20F. But I am going out to stack some kind of Spring celebration anyway.