To seal or not to seal....

by Lisa
(Texas)

Hello,

I don't know if you can help me, but I sure am hoping so. We put in a pond 6 months ago and purchased a palate of 2" flagstone to go around the pond. About half of the flagstone had the pond liner underneath and about half just had soil underneath. Nearly all of the flagstone we used had horrible flaking and layers chipping off. Many even split down the center. They started doing this shortly after we got them. When we contacted the stone company we purchased it from they said that moisture would cause flagstone to do that. I guess I assumed that since it's a rock and comes from outside it would withstand some rain, plus we have natural fall where we installed them. So is this true? Should we have installed them differently....or installed a different rock altogether? It's coming time to clean the pond so we're going to redo the lay of the land surrounding it and contemplated getting more flagstone to replace the broken ones. We really like the "wet look" we've seen in pictures, but I noticed you guys don't recommend that either. The other thing I wondered about is cleaning the rocks before sealing. Is that necessary? Is sealing necessary? And if we want the wet look is that an okay option? Nothing is going to be cemented into anything, nothing is going to be grouted. If we do seal them, do we need to seal the entire rock or just the top? I guess I'm not understanding whether cleaning and sealing are protective measures or cosmetic ones. Hmmm.. We also have river rock that looks beautiful when wet so we had hoped to seal that with something that would give it the wet look as well. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated. We haven't seemed to be able to get any kind of helpful answers from anyone else. Your site looks amazing!!

Thanks in advance!