Flâneur Gardening

>I keep pondering and googling methods for building turf walls. It really is extraordinarily fascinating once you start reading up on the various techniques and styles, and I have to constantly remind myself that I will NOT be building a farmhouse; merely a 15-foot retaining wall for a raised shrubbery.

It seems so tempting to try making patterns and structure in the wall, but a) the wall will not be seen, as the only surface of it will be towards the road, hidden behind a low row of hawthorn and b) the simplest and most durable way to build such a small wall will just be to cut long strips of sod and stack them in staggered courses, using wooden stakes to anchor it into the ground and bamboo sticks to interlink the courses. I might also add some horizontal bamboo sticks between courses to give the wall – or should that be a “wall-ette”? – greater initial rigidity.

I’ll be cutting strips like this by making parallel cuts (with a spade… No fancy high-tech gear for this job!) into the lawn with 10 inches (or however wide the blade of our spade is) between them and then undercutting them about 2 inches down. Ideally I want to create long strips so the turf will bring its own integrity to the wall, but as long as each strip is minimum 20 inches long I’m pretty sure I will get a good building material. (And shorter strips are not so heavy…) The shorter strips would require more bamboo pegs, but I think I should be able to produce a straight, vertical wall all the same as the wall will only be about 16 inches high, i.e. 8-10 courses.

For lateral strength – I’m really putting a lot of thought into this tiny wallette – I’ll let the ends of the wall bend and twist a bit, and for the central part of the longest stretch I’ll be adding a “buttress” that will be covered by the top soil. The front of the raised shrubbery will slope down towards the lawn and end in a herbaceous border of sorts around the young plum tree.

Layering the turf will be as simple as anything, so the challenge is in the cutting; creating strips of uniform thickness that will behave like flat building blocks that can be stacked without leaning to one side or the other. The turf needs to be able to hold itself, and stakes and pegs are only a temporary measure to help me keep the wall straight as it sets and partially dries out.

I confess: I’m a geek! I can geek out over Excel macros or sexual conventions in the Tudor age, so why not geek out over a turf wall? I love the history of using an ancient technique, I love the sustainability and I love the unobtrusive look it will hopefully result in. (And I also love that it’s not only cheap, but free!) Also, I do love how much pleasure I’m getting just from plotting and planning this; that alone makes it a project worth undertaking, regardless of the result!