Owensound Ledgerock

About 2 months ago, I had a chance to visit a very special place! I figure that every landscape designer, architect and natural stone enthusiast should make it a point to visit this place at least once in their career!
The place you ask? The Owen Sound Ledgerock Quarry Facility in Owen Sound, Ontario.

Now it has been over a decade since I was last in school and going on class field trips, but when this opportunity came up to visit the Quarry, I put everything on hold and jumped at the chance to go! Consider this place, the place of ideas and wonders of what can be done with natural stone... in the picture below is a pile of limestone quarried out of the Niagara Escarpment in the surrounding area.

What Ledgerock does with it after is combine old world ideas with new world technology and provides you with a beautiful natural product. As the stone is picked through and selected for various uses, saws like the one in the photo below go to work at the stone chunks.


Computer coordinates are entered into the saw's control program and these slabs of stone get sliced and diced into different shapes.

This was the saw of all saws! I figure that blade was a diameter of 12 or 14 feet and the sound it made once it started to slice the stone was the equivalent to locking a jet aircraft inside a room and having it go to full throttle while you stood beside it!

The stream of water that showers down from the saw helps to keep the blade cool and keeps the stone dust created by the cuttings from flying around, filling the room.

Here we see some of the stone slabs being polished into smooth top counters for use in kitchens, bars or even office buildings. My one regret was that I did not get a picture of the finished counter top... the grain of the stone pattern was gorgeous! A deep rich looking mix of brown colours.

Anyway, after all that mess of stone piles and saws...the end result is packaged up into wood crates and ready to be shipped all over the place....

I would say that this has to be one of my favourite natural stone pavers. The Owen Sound Bush hammered flagstone and coping gives any landscape site a very elegant and timeless finish to the space. If a client were to ask me, what stone I would use on a project? I would say to look no further than this article!

Privacy Screen...

This recent project was a simple deck overhaul in Downtown Toronto. The home owners had started out with an interior reno-project through the winter and worked their way right out to the backyard this spring.

Basically the old deck had consisted of rotting boards and very little space for today's style of furniture... A simple addition of a few more feet to the deck and eliminating a big step out from the back door gave the deck a lot more space to use for furniture and walkway room.

Add to that a very simplified design of a privacy screen to help create that feeling of a room and you have a nice outdoor extension to your quaint little downtown backyard.... without a major renovation expense.

The wood used here is Tigerwood...not to be confused with the golfer... it can be stained to preserve the beautiful rich colour you see, or left to weather to a silver-grey colour. The project was crafted by the expertise of Tony Fredricks of the wood crafters... 416-420-3999

Canadian Home Workshop

It was about the beginning of February... I was at my drafting table dreaming of warmer days and the season to come. I was drawing away on a landscape plan for a customer... placing a pool in the correct position for them when my phone rings and it is the editor for Canadian Home Workshop asking me if I wanted to participate in a story they were doing. Now there is a call you don't expect to get every day!

The idea was to have me create 3 landscape plans centered around 3 themes and make the drawings look pretty. The question was...would I be interested in doing that? My answer was very short and direct! Yes!!!!...as would be the case with most any landscape designer worth his salt...when presented with a chance to display themselves in a magazine...who would say no?
So here it is folks... in this months current issue of Canadian Home Workshop...it is actually the April/May 2010 issue... which can be found in stores now or ordered online here!

Anyway, after my phone conversation, I tossed my blackberry on the table and went back to measuring my pool spacing to ensure proper setback dimensions according to the Town of Aurora, Ontario. I kept looking back at my phone and wondering if I really just had the conversation I had....first with the editor and then a second one with the art director...or was I actually sound asleep and dreaming of a life that was not mine!?!

When I sat down to draw the 3 plans, it seemed like kind of a fuzzy dream to me as the drawings were just like any other landscape plan I would do...only I was the client for each of the three backyard plans! Anyway, I just drew from my experience with the many clients I have designed for and created the concepts you will see in the magazine article...

It was fun!...lol...it was a lot of fun...and a lot of hard work too!!!....not to mention I was drawing these in the comfort of my workspace, watching Team Canada play Hockey...listening to a crackling fire in the wood burning stove while the snow lay on the ground outside.

When I opened my mail up yesterday...there it was...my hard work along side my name printed in ink... in a magazine seen across Canada...not only was my stuff in there, but my good friend and colleague, Lawrence Winterburn of Gardenstructure.com has one of his deck designs featured on the front cover of this issue along with a few showcased photos contained in a couple of the articles within this issue. He is someone I would gladly share the spotlight with on any given day....

Just wanted to say that the people at Canadian Home Workshop were a great bunch to work with and wanted to thank them for this opportunity!