Feature Garden: Set In Stone
19 Jan 2016
This garden was carved out of a hillside and “set” in amazing stonework.
By Lisa Truesdale Photos by Allison M. Fleetwood Jr., www.amfjphotography.com To a kid, a steeply sloped yard is a dream come true—for rolling down in the summer or sledding down in the snow. But for a gardener, it poses numerous problems and rarely succeeds without some help. George Emmons is the founder and owner of Boulder’s popular Into the Wind kite store, and an architect by trade. In 1990, he designed his home in west Boulder that he shares with Scott Shevlin. To make the most of the terrain, the house is cut right into the hillside.
The Cottonwood Incident
But Viera’s work wasn’t over. Emmons clearly remembers the morning about five years ago when he heard an earth-shattering boom outside the front door. A massive cottonwood had plunged off the steep hillside abutting his lot and crashed into the front yard. Miraculously, it missed the power lines and the house, but it “beheaded” the chair he usually sat in on the patio. The next day, city workers removed the tree, which they estimated weighed a whopping 27,000 pounds. They used a huge chain saw to chop it into big sections and a crane to remove them. “When they cut it up, thousands of gallons of water came gushing out of the trunk,” Emmons says. Once the cottonwood was gone, the couple discovered there was much more damage to repair than just Emmons’ favorite chair. They called in Viera to completely rebuild the patio, which ended up being slightly larger than before. He also redesigned and repaired several terraced sections below it, and then crafted a gorgeous stone archway—now the focal point in the front yard—to replace a metal one that was crushed under the tree’s massive weight. Like before, Emmons says, “I would say what I wanted, and Marco would do it. Sometimes he wouldn’t do it quite the way I thought, but I would end up liking it even more.” “It’s a great collaboration,” Viera agrees. “We both have an open mind and we’ve learned how to make our separate ideas come together into one.”
