By Jim McCausland, Sunset Magazine
When Jeffrey Bale visited Portugal and Spain twenty-some years ago, he discovered some of the most beautiful stone surfaces he’d ever seen. Organic and naturalistic, they were part mosaic and part pavement—perfect for his own garden, he thought, so he made one.
The project took a summer to complete, and it’s beautiful 20 years later. In the interim Bale, a Portland (OR) landscape designer, has studied gardens and stone mosaics on four continents, and built horizontal, vertical, and three dimensional versions ever since. Some are representational art, some simply geometric, and many suggest subjects from Persian carpets to physics and the tree of life.
Most people in the business build horizontal mosaics on dry bases, then when everything is in place, apply enough moisture to make the cement set. But Bale lays them in wet mortar, working fast enough to get it right before the base dries. It gives him a more permanent product, and you can walk on it the next day (dry-laid mosaics need to cure up to a month before use).
The result? “Lavish and rich,” in his words, “jewelry for the garden.”
If you want to contact Bale, better do it in a hurry. Next week he's off to the south of Italy, then Greece, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey, where he'll be studying some of the world's oldest mosaics. Or wait until he comes back, loaded with new ideas that are doubtless rooted in very old ones.
