Hillside Gardening Tips
See how this steep hillside was transformed into terraces, creating usable gardening space.
A video transcript featuring Ive Haugeland, Shades of Green Landscape Architecture
The most important thing when you do a hillside landscape is to think about the proportions between the height of the walls and the width of the areas, so you get something that is comfortable. For these steps, we decided to make very sloped steps going up, so it's very comfortable to walk and it's not very steep. The plantings are also kind of low, and somewhat hang over the walls.
Materials used
The material we used here was decomposed granite, and decomposed granite doesn't work so well on slopes. So we did these concrete steps to hold it all in place. For this project, we used concrete block pavers. These are locally manufactured, which cuts down on how much they travel, and it's just more sustainable if you can find local materials. They also are less expensive than concrete walls because they go together really easy. You just stack them on top of each other, and you put these pins down in between them, and there you have the wall.
