Secret Of The Stone

by Mary Jasch

High in the backyard woods of New Jersey's suburbia, a secret, quiet place awaits a gardener. Every evening, she comes to enjoy the setting sun. "Your body's on the chair but your head's somewhere else."

Corinne Nallet's expansive yard in the Highlands of Morris County is a gardener's dream. She works the rocky land, with the help of her mentor/gardener Jacob Salman, planting gardens of wildflowers and shrubs. But this one is special to Nallet. It's her haven from the world.

"It's secret because I wanted an escape somewhere where I couldn't be found right away," she says.

Nallet's stone garden is away from the house in a shady grove. On a ledge above the road, the trees hide it from view from both the house and the road, yet allow an open western view. "Don't be stiff. Go with the land and be lucky," she advises.

She says the lay of the land dictated the design of the garden --­ the movement of the stone and the way the witch hazel drapes over it. The natural rock inspired her to use a mixture of stone.

Nallet and Salman brought in eight tons of stone dust and used it to level the gentle slope and to create a platform for the garden. They built it up and packed it down to a thickness of 6 to 12 inches. "It's a way to cheat without using cement," says Salman.

They hauled in "aged apple creek" rock, field stone type slabs, and built a walkway through the woods to get to the garden. Scattered river rock surrounds the slabs, slightly misaligned. "The stones are uneven," he says. "Nothing is perfect in life."

Corinne Nallet sits on original rock. At a slightly lower elevation towards the road, the pair made a terrace with natural stone, filled it with soil and planted variegated boxwood. This gives the garden privacy without obstructing the view.

The stone plaza was created next. Nallet found slices of cement block that she calls "slices of lemon" and laid them out in a daisy design. Next, they filled in with Mexican river stone.

Finally, Nallet created an "angel butterfly" sculpture from the three major rock types used in the project. The base is aged apple creek, the center rock is native and the top is a goose egg river rock, all fixed together with cement glue. She says it wasn't expensive, but that it just took ingenuity and sweat.

Salman says they had a reason for every plant, every stone, every bush. "The whole reason for this garden is I used to come here when there was nothing. I used to sit my tush on a rock and watch the sunset," she says. "It became secret because when I sat here on my little rock, you couldn't find me. It was a secret place."

Now the garden's not so secret anymore, as Nallet and her husband John sit together in Adirondak chairs that face out over a northwest valley. But it's still very private. "The way the land is positioned is the answer," she says.

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published June 01, 2003