My wife, Suzanne, and I built our cottage in the Berkshire Hills of southwestern Massachusetts six years ago. And I mean that literally—together with our late son, Matthew, we contributed our labor to nearly every stage of the process. We helped to clear the site and to raise the frame of hewn pine timbers, and supplied unskilled labor to the carpenters. Incidentally, if you enjoy thrillers, I recommend you try standing by while your 13-year-old son attacks a wall with a Sawzall® to cut openings for windows. My wife and I did all the painting inside and out; I taught myself how to mix and apply stucco so that Matt and I could dress the exterior of the foundation.

Given this history of self-help, I certainly wasn’t going to hire landscapers to install a garden. That’s one reason the landscaping has lagged—finishing the outdoor environment doesn’t have the same urgency as making sure the house itself is weather-tight and habitable. Gradually, though, we’ve created a lush vegetable garden and what I hope will one day be a lush little orchard of cider apples.

This summer, Suzanne shooed me out of what has become her kitchen garden. As a result, I have had time to address the decorative areas of the landscape. I chose to attack two problems simultaneously. I’d clear away some of the heaps of stone excavated out of what became our cellar and at the same time build walls to enclose a court in front of the cottage.

Stone is my favorite material for landscape construction. Though it’s time-consuming to install, stone is maintenance free once in place. It’s durable, typically increasing in beauty as it ages and acquires the patina of time. What’s more, if you use a locally collected stone, as I was intending to do, it perfectly integrates your construction into the landscape. A wall or terrace or flight of steps will look as if born of the land itself, rather than human hands.

Best of all, building with stone, though strenuous, can be a remarkably forgiving process. The key is to avoid the use of mortar and lay your stone “dry,” bedding paving stones in sand or grit and building walls by stacking stone on stone. This style of construction has two advantages for the amateur like me. If you make a mistake, you can disassemble whatever you have been building and reassemble it in a better fashion.

The second advantage of “dry-stack” construction is that it is less vulnerable to the weather than mortared masonry. If you miscalculate the foundation of a mortared stone wall, winter frost or a slow settling of the soil will shatter your work. Dry-stack walls, though, have the ability to adjust. Stones can ride up with the heaving of the frost to settle back into place with the spring thaw; a slight subsidence of the underlying soil may create a dip in your wall but it won’t destroy it. This is the secret of the classic New England stone wall’s longevity—they move with the times.

The basics of dry-stack wall building are easily learned. I enrolled in a couple of weekend-long workshops, one with Japanese-trained landscape designer Julie Moir Messervy, the other taught by master mason Neil Rippingale of the Kentucky-based Dry Stone Conservancy. (The photo is of a wall I helped to rebuild during Julie Messervy’s workshop.)

This brief period of instruction hardly made me a skilled craftsman. My walls don’t have the precision and polish of Neil Rippingale’s work, and I can’t begin to match his speed and efficiency. Thanks to what he and Julie taught me, however, I can assemble a durable, attractive dry-stack wall if I take my time.

This summer, I’ve already completed about 70 linear feet of a wall 30 inches wide at the base and 26 inches high. In the process, I’ve cleared away much of the debris left behind by the excavators of our cellar. Another 60 or so feet of wall and I will have framed my little court.

In my next post, I’ll address the issue of sustainable (and inexpensive) sources of stone for those without a natural supply, and some of the techniques involved in the dry-stack process. In the meantime, I urge you to check out Julie Messervy’s Web site and that of the Dry Stone Conservancy. Their different perspectives on this work, one (Julie’s) shaped by the Japanese tradition, the other derived from northern Europe, neatly complement each other.