How to Build a Flower Box With Stacked Slate

Raised garden beds or flower boxes can offer creative and attractive solutions to soil drainage and other problems or simply provide a lasting landscape interest. Flower boxes can be constructed using a number of different materials, including timber, concrete, brick and stone. One attractive, though sometimes heavy, difficult-to-handle and generally expensive material is slate. Slate can also be relatively easy to organize and stack and may be used to match existing slate structures or walkways. Raised flower boxes made of slate are simple, though sometimes time-consuming and strenuous to construct.

Stakes and string, or hose
Digging tools
Level
Gravel
Tamper
Sand
Slate

Instructions

- 1
  Mark the edges of the planned flower box using stakes and strings, a garden hose, sprinkled sand or some other material.
- 2
  Dig a trench along the planned border. The trench should be about 2 inches wider than the slate wall will be, and the depth should be about half the thickness of the slate plus 2 inches, or a total of about 4 inches. Make the bottom of the trench roughly level.
- 3
  Add about 2 inches of gravel to the trench. Use a tamper to compact the gravel and make sure that the gravel is roughly level, rearranging the gravel as needed.
- 4
  Add about 1 inch of sand to the top of the gravel. Smooth the sand out and use the level to make sure that the sand will provide a completely even base for the stone.
- 5
  Lay the first layer, or course, of slate. Use the heaviest, largest stones for this bottom layer. Make sure that the stones are butted up against each other as tightly as possible.
- 6
  Set the second and any following rows of slate stones on top of this first layer. Make sure that the stones are staggered so that the joints of one row do not line up with the row beneath it. Fit the stones together tightly.
- 7
  Fill the flower box in with well-drained, light soil rich in organic matter and plant vegetation as desired.

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