Terraced Landscaping
See how a steep hillside was terraced with concrete block walls to provide the homeowners with more usable outdoor space.
A video transcript featuring Ive Haugeland, Shades of Green Landscape Architecture
The main things we were focusing on in this garden were to make more useable space, to use very drought-tolerant plantings, and to put in permeable surfaces. There's one house here that is really close, and we used a big timber bamboo to screen it, and the timber bamboo is getting cut like a hedge so you can actually still see the view above it.
A good idea to add more usable area and add more square footage is to terrace the hillside. We did that here for this patio. It was originally a much smaller patio. We filled it in and we used concrete block walls to create the terraces, so the result is a much bigger patio that the client can use, and the views from here are amazing.
Hardscaping materials
We used a lot of permeable paving and decomposed granite. The permeable paving allows the water to come down in the soil again, and percolate down into ground-water. For the driveway we have concrete pavers that I've set on sand, so there is some permeability there, and also on this patio, even if the pavers are bigger, they are also set on sand so water can come down through.
Plantings
The plant palette we used for this project was a lot of grasses and succulents. It's all very drought-tolerant. We used these bunny tail grasses, which are absolutely gorgeous in the summer. We used aloes, senecios and different echeverias, all to create this look with different textures and colors. All these elements make this a really nice hillside landscape that the client can enjoy.