These walls were a testing ground where Aalto experimented with different textures, materials and designs, playing with brick, stone and ceramic swatches and setting them against various finishes and ornamental plants.

BBC: An Alvar Aalto tour of Finland

Old carriage houses and other traditional driveways of the past would often have strips of grass in between the track areas, or their designs would include naturally permeable materials, like crushed stone.

FORBES: America's Coolest Driveways

These cylindrical pieces of stone, some barely an inch in length, were incised with intaglio designs featuring gods and animals.

WSJ: The Ur-Metropolis | Uruk | Pergamon Museum | By A.J. Goldmann

Snow artists have also been let loose on the designs, and igloos sport fanciful carvings of anything from swans to the stone faces of Angkor.

BBC: Five European winter boltholes