Blending river walls with mother earth

[tiger88mm]

Whats the best way to bring these two together so that it looks realistic,on my river course i have a couple of area's that are 8 to 12 inches deep and when i got to the top i put down cement and rock to hold back the dirt and thats exactly what it look like,rock and cement,not natural or convincing for a river course,so what can i do to make this look more natural,thank
Bryan

[Rene Schweitzer]

Tiger,

You might read some of Jack Verducci's stuff (our Garden railway design columnist). He's writing a series on the same exact thing. He uses his special mixture he calls "gulapata", a sort of colored concrete mix. From the pics you can see it looks very realistic.

Download an older article of his here (free), that gives his "recipe" for gulapata:
http://www.trains.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/004/997emwzk.asp
You'll need Acrobat to open it (also free).

[Anonymous]

And remember to dig deeper as the "gulapata" or what ever you use brings up your finial grade for the river.
I made a small error once [:-^]