The devil is in the detail - granite sett edging

I can hear you saying "Whut? What on earth is she on about now?!"

This might sound like a digression, but bear with me - some years back, my good friends Nigel and Anne were teasing me about my on-going campaign to find a new word for "gardener" because, as I say in my book about How To Be a Successful Self-Employed Gardener (available to download for free if you have Kindle Unlimited) (shameless plug!):

"We all know the difference between a cook and a Chef: anyone can cook, but you need training, experience, and a certain degree of flair, to take everyday ingredients and combine them in interesting, delicious, unusual ways: in other words, to be a Chef. 

"In the same way, anyone can be a "gardener", but those of us who are qualified, experienced, insured, careful, and thorough, deserve to have a job title that makes it plain that we are not amateurs, we are professionals, working with the same 'ingredients' as amateurs, but combining them in new and exciting ways."

They, ever-helpful, came up with the suggestion "Artisan". At first, I laughed, but then I thought about it: I'd seen a recipe just a day or two earlier, whose presentation advice was to "serve with artisan bread."

Now, I had no idea at all what "artisan bread" was, but at the same time, I knew EXACTLY what it was: I knew on which shelf of the supermarket I would find it: it would be bread, but rather than mass-produced white sliced loaves, it would be something hand-baked, non-mass-produced, more expensive than supermarket bread, possibly much tastier, made by someone with experience and/or training in bread making, someone with a bit of artistic flair, possibly using more expensive materials.

This nicely sums up my approach to gardening!

But it also applies to people working in the garden: and now, at long last, we get to the point of this article.  One of my Clients recently had their drive widened, and the builder put in a line of granite setts to edge the drive.

Granite setts are irregular, to say the least: they look more-or-less like square blocks, but they are all slightly different shapes.

And this is how the builder chose to lay them:  with the "straight" edges facing onto the soil.

I was so pleased!

If I'd been there while they were working, that was exactly what I would have suggested: because we can see the edge clearly against the dark soil, but we can barely see the edge against the jangly shingle of the drive.

In fact, I bet that you had to look closely at the photo to see what I mean. 

In case you can't see it, here's a closer look:

There - now you can see that the right-hand edge of the setts are more or less in a straight line.

Whereas the left-hand edges are in and out, shake it all about, quite irregular.

But the irregularity doesn't matter on the drive side, because the multi-coloured shingle disguises it.

However, against the plain dark soil, it would be very obvious.

So this is an example of the devil being in the detail: the builder, who was there to lay the drive, not to make flower beds, could have put the setts the other way round, not even thinking about how it looked.

In fact, in many ways, that's the way that I would have expected a builder to do it - because they were focussing on the drive.

They could have thought, if they had thought at all, "oh, the plants will soon cover it up, it won't matter which way round they go."

But at some times of the year, the plants get cut back....

So there you have it, that builder has now been promoted, in my mind, to an "artisan builder" because he took the time to place the granite setts in an orientation which will be pleasing to the eye for years to come.

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