Given the container craze that's overtaken the gardening world, and longtime interest in homemade "hypertufa" troughs that mimic naturally porous tufa rock, Mackey thinks crafts-minded gardeners may soon embrace papercrete, too.
"Mud Pie 101," she calls it.
Truth be told, it does look like a mud pie, this therapeutic mix of finely shredded newspaper or junk mail, common Portland cement, sand or perlite, and water. Outfitted in face mask, rubber gloves, and apron, Mackey kneads it into a muddy ball, like bread dough, in a plastic tub on a fold-up table draped in plastic.
She squeezes lumps and corrals rogue paper scraps as she goes, insisting, "It's not rocket science."
When the consistency is just right, not too dry or too wet, the blob is gently pressed into a plastic lid from a store-bought carrot cake. Which means that after "curing" for a day or two in Mackey's Wayne garage, her molded planter looks pretty much like an ossified bundt cake.
But artfully filled with dwarf conifers, jewel-toned sedums and saxifrages, tiny tufts of moss and rock slivers, this simple trough garden turns complex and interesting. Now, it's darkly ancient, rough-hewn, and weathered, as if lifted from a craggy crevice in the Dolomites.
That's the right look for Mackey, president of the North American Rock Garden Society's Delaware Valley chapter. "It goes with my garden, which is very naturalistic," she says.
For decades, environmental adventurers with a naturalistic bent have been experimenting with papercrete, which they saw as cheap, lightweight, easy to work with, good insulation, and aesthetically correct. Although it recycles paper, it's not particularly "green" because of the cement, the making of which generates huge amounts of carbon emissions.
