I love the look and durability of stone and the fact that once installed it requires virtually no maintenance. From the perspective of sustainability, however, it gets a more mixed report card.

When I decided to build a wall in the Berkshires (see photo), I found an abundant supply of stone on the property. Few home gardeners are so lucky; most must acquire their stone off site. The easiest option is to buy freshly quarried stone from a building supply company. This, however, is also the least sustainable source. The stone blocks sold by the pallet-load at such establishments are either stolen from old stone walls or else strip-mined from a quarry with all the environmental costs that implies.

The cost of transporting stone is also high, and greater than it used to be. Once upon a time, stone was generally quarried close to the place of its intended use— hauling this heavy material over land for any distance with horse and wagon was just too difficult. Today, however, stone products are more often quarried where labor is cheap and environmental regulations lax. For example, the rough, rectangular granite pavers used to pave early American streets and still popular for edging driveways and paths are now produced mainly in India. The carbon footprint of such weighty objects imported from the other side of the globe isn’t pretty to contemplate.

You can, however, avoid many of the environmental costs of using stone in your landscape by using material salvaged from demolished buildings. Usually, such recycled material isn’t hard to find: Many stoneyards deal in salvaged stone as a sideline.

By recycling stone you avoid the environmental damage caused by mining new blocks or pavers from the earth. Salvaged stone often supplies aesthetic advantages as well: Its weather-softened edges and patina can lend your project an instant aura of age. Because it commonly dates to a time when quarrying was still a local business, recycled stone frequently offers local authenticity as well.

When I wanted to build retaining walls in my backyard in Middletown, Connecticut, I decided to make them out of brownstone. Our house lies just across the Connecticut River from the site of a quarry that supplied much of the brownstone for New York City. The off-cuts, the pieces that weren’t saleable to the big-city builders, were widely used as material for foundations and walls in Middletown. When I checked at the nearest stone yard, I found that I could buy enough salvaged brownstone to make my walls for $1,200.

That’s a modest price, but I did much better. An old building was being demolished half a mile from our house, and I introduced myself to the man who was clearing the site for new construction by hauling away the debris. For $150 he was happy to dump a truckload of brownstone from the building’s foundation in my yard.

Another source of inexpensive, local stones for building a dry-stack wall can be sand and gravel companies. Many of these still dig their materials locally, mining the sand beds of old glacial deposits. Mixed with the sand are, commonly, rocks of varying sizes. The miners usually run these through a stone crusher and sell the result as aggregate for making road beds and the base for parking lots. Call the local sand and gravel supplier, take a trip to their quarry, and if you like what you see, negotiate a price for diverting a truckload from the crusher to your yard. The result could be a wall that is not only inexpensive and durable but also genuinely local.

My own retaining walls look like outcroppings of the local bedrock. You cannot root a garden into the landscape better than that.