Landscaping for steep backyard
Backyard Slope Landscaping Ideas - 10 Things To Do
Break Out in Tiers
1/11
Creating several tiers on a sloped property can help manage erosion and give you the opportunity to layer different plants and landscaping elements for a cohesive design. Whether you use railroad ties, stone pavers, or concrete to form the tiers, they will make a dramatic impact on the overall look of your property.
Related: 9 Clever Landscaping Hacks for Your Best-Ever Yard
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Build Some Stairs
2/11
If you choose to let vegetation cover your sloping property in glorious abandon, impose a little order by building a set of stairs leading up to flatter ground. Whether you opt for a wooden staircase or concrete steps, this garden feature will blend into the landscape far better if it’s surrounded by plantings on either side.
Related: 12 Perfect Plants for Lining Your Pathway
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Make a Natural Staircase
3/11
Use a natural material like stone to create a stepped pathway through your sloping property. A stone stairway will complement surrounding plantings and help anchor your landscaping design.
Related: 7 Thrifty Designs for a DIY Walkway
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Design a Waterfall
4/11
If you’re ambitious, use the height that your hilly backyard provides to your advantage, and build a sensational water feature. The soothing sound of water will bring a relaxing air to your outdoor space, turning it into your own private oasis.
Related: 10 Outdoor Living Ideas to Steal from California
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Lay a Winding Path
5/11
A winding or switchback path can make it much easier—and safer—to explore a sloped piece of property. A meandering pathway also provides an attractive focal point and draws the eye through the landscape.
Related: 10 Inspiring Ideas for Your Side Yard
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Erect a Retaining Wall
6/11
You can make a sloping property more functional by cutting away a portion of a hill and installing a retaining wall to hold back the soil. This is a great opportunity to create a dedicated planting area behind and along the retaining wall, while reclaiming a portion of your yard for an expanse of grass on level ground.
Related: Edge Your Beds: 11 Easy Ideas for Landscape Borders
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Cultivate a Rock Garden
7/11
Hillsides can pose a landscaping challenge for plants, which can suffer from the soil erosion or poor drainage typical of sloping properties. When you arrange rocks of varying shapes and sizes on your hillside, you create a stable base for rock-loving plants like stonecrop, ornamental grasses, and creeping ground covers. A rock garden looks lush and satisfying to the eye, and reduces your maintenance load in the yard.
Related: 25 Plants for Your Easiest Garden Ever
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Devise a Destination Fire Pit
8/11
Building hardscapes into a sloping property is a common and rewarding landscaping practice. When a design culminates in an alluring destination like a fire pit, you’ll draw visitors through your yard and transform what might otherwise be neglected space into the place to be.
Related: No Money to Burn? 9 Fire Pits You Can Afford
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Install Veggie Beds
9/11
You can take advantage of unused real estate on a slope that gets full sun by installing raised beds for vegetables. Deeper sections of the beds can be used for root vegetables that require more soil, and the shallower portions will be perfect for herbs and vining plants.
Related: 13 Creative Designs for Easy DIY Planters
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Rely on Native Plants
10/11
Festooning a hillside with plants that are native to your area can help make maintenance easier in a spot that would be difficult to mow and landscape. With native plants, you can be fairly certain that they’ll be successful without much help from you, and they will help reduce erosion by providing a network of roots to hold soil in place.
Related: 25 Amazing Plants That Are Native to North America
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How to Cope with a Slope
11/11
With the right plan, even a steeply sloped backyard can be useable and enjoyable.
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How to Garden on a Slope: 12 Ideas for Hillsides
Turn uneven ground into a lush garden with these landscaping tips
By
Marie Iannotti
Marie Iannotti
Marie Iannotti is a life-long gardener and a veteran Master Gardener with nearly three decades of experience.
She's also an author of three gardening books, a plant photographer, public speaker, and a former Cornell Cooperative Extension Horticulture Educator. Marie's garden writing has been featured in newspapers and magazines nationwide and she has been interviewed for Martha Stewart Radio, National Public Radio, and numerous articles.
Learn more about The Spruce's Editorial Process
Updated on 09/28/22
The Spruce / Marie Iannotti
A slope or hillside can be intimidating when landscape planning. They're also challenging to walk on and work on. Gardening on a slope additionally comes with the risk of soil runoff. Since water naturally runs downhill, it's a good idea to stabilize a slope with contour rows, terraces, or raised beds.
However, hillsides also have some built-in advantages. You have an instant view, and creating a dynamic sense of movement with plants positioned on a hill is easy. This resourceful gardener used the contrasting plant textures of the conical evergreens, spiky flowers, flowing ornamental grasses, and rounded shrubs to animate the garden.
The scene is kept moving by a river of silver lamb's ear that runs the length of the bed.
Also, if you're landscaping on a budget, consider groundcovers that will give you a carpet of green along the slope. Incorporate a flower garden on the hill by selecting hillside flowers and vegetation that like to grow in crags and crevices, or on a slope, like sedum, rock cress, creeping phlox, and sweet alyssum.
Click Play for Hillside Landscaping Ideas
Retaining Your Sloped Garden
Retaining walls are how you keep dirt from washing away on a slope. Soil erosion is bound to happen with water and gravity doing the dirty work. But you can add wood, rock, or concrete block to make a retaining wall to hold the soil in place. You can also stagger retaining walls to build a tiered garden on a slope.
Consider installing a retaining wall if you have a steep slope of over 50% or 45 degrees. When installing any retaining wall, add a good drainage system behind the wall to prevent the wall from cracking or collapsing.
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Terracing a Hillside Vegetable Garden
Kirk Longpré / Pacific HorticultureA hillside can be a blessing when designing a vegetable garden, especially a south-facing slope. This west coast garden shared by the Pacific Horticulture Society takes advantage of the elevated ground along the trellised side by planting flowers that will be at eye level as someone walks down the path. Each terraced row is on its own level and gets direct sunlight without being shaded by the row in front. It can be a challenge to get supplies and water to the area. It would be wise to consider drip irrigation, and pathways between the vegetable rows are a must.
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Anchoring a Hillside Garden
The Spruce / Marie IannottiThe soil on a hillside is often less than ideal.
The topsoil tends to wash off quickly, taking the nutrients and fertility with it. It's not uncommon to have a hillside, primarily rocks, barely covered with a topping of soil. In that case, you may have to create planting pockets and add some additional soil to establish plants. This gardener made use of two workhorses, astilbe and hosta. Both can grow in the shade of this creek hillside, and both are hardy enough to take hold in the poor soil. She divided the original plants and quickly covered the entire slope within a few years.
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03 of 12
Terracing a Hillside With Stone
sdgtrackerStone walls are a classic way to terrace and tame a hillside. Although they are a lot of work initially, once they are in place, you have a functional and attractive structure. Stone walls can create planting areas wide enough to work in and around, and they even look good on their own, requiring very little fanfare from the plants contained in them. Since stone tends to heat up early in the spring and hold heat at night, you are creating a microclimate that will allow you to grow plants that would not survive in other areas of your yard.
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04 of 12
A Borrowed Hillside View
The Spruce / Marie IannottiA hillside can become part of your landscape even if it tapers off into the distance. These homeowners live near a wooded lot that slopes toward their yard and house. They limbed up the trees to create a clearer view. They underplanted with actual woodland plants such as maidenhair ferns (Adiantum) and mayapples, as well as rugged workhorses like hostas and foamflower (Tiarella). The effect is almost a fairytale setting that sets the house as a destination.
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05 of 12
Taming a Hillside in Small Bites
1001 GardensWhen the angle of the slope is extreme, stairs are a necessity. However, you do not have to landscape the entire hillside—at least not all at once. Take advantage of the area closest to your living area and create manageable planting boxes. At the lower levels, you can do it without extra equipment, and the boxes are not just easy to work in; they create a garden room for relaxing and entertaining.
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06 of 12
A Natural Hillside Rock Garden
Solidaria GardenPart of the challenge of landscaping a hillside is establishing the plants before they wash down the slope. Plants need water to become established, and watering a barren slope is an invitation for runoff. If you are not going to be terracing the hillside and creating flat areas for planting, adding large rocks and boulders is a good alternative way to anchor the soil while the plants take hold.
This gardener made his hillside rock garden look natural by allowing the rocks to tumble and land where they may. Some weeding and maintenance are involved in the early years, but it becomes less as the plants spread out. As the plants fill in, it looks like the whole garden evolved independently.
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07 of 12
Gardening a Roadside Slope
The Spruce / Marie iannottiIt's lovely to have a house situated on a hill overlooking the landscape, but that sometimes means your yard slopes down to the road, giving you the effect of a hell strip in your front yard.
As with any other slope, you need tough plants that won't require a lot of grooming. Shrubs and evergreen are ideal for this situation. Since you don't want to obscure the view at the side of the road completely, fill in the front section with lower-growing perennials that will not need frequent division, such as hosta and ferns. -
08 of 12
Creating an Alpine Hillside Garden
The Spruce / Marie IannottiConsider yourself lucky if your hillside is basically scree or naturally covered in rocks. You can create a unique alpine garden that will draw the eye upward. Follow this gardener's lead and use the existing rocks, but reposition them. Larger slabs are used as steps and platforms. She also makes liberal use of hypertufa or artificial limestone, which blends in beautifully with the natural stone. Finally, pea gravel is used as a mulch, to prevent runoff and create a unifying color palette.
Large evergreens give the planting weight, and self-sowing perennials, like corydalis, are allowed to fill in where they will and soften the rocky ledge.
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09 of 12
Turning a Hillside Into a Garden Walk
Carol Norquist / Flickr / CC BY-ND 2.0Terracing the walkway while leaving the planting area elevated gives the effect of encompassing passersby in the flowers. Instead of steps, these homeowners have chosen to lay stepping stones with just enough traction to keep walkers steady.
The exuberant perennials along the walkway are given even more level changes by using containers and pot stands on the lower levels, which create focal points for the journey down. And drivers passing by on the road get a full view of the hillside garden, rather than only the front few plants a flat garden would afford them.
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10 of 12
A Four-Season Hillside Garden
PicreviseWhen you have a hillside that frames a view of your house, you want it to remain attractive year-round. Colorful shrubs are the perfect answer. Not only do they have four seasons of interest, they require minimal, if any, maintenance.
A little pruning in the spring and your hillside should look good for the rest of the year. And shrubs are excellent for controlling erosion. Summersweet (Clethra alnifolia), California lilac (Ceanothus), and prostrate rosemary make good choices. -
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Covering Ground on a Hillside
Scott Beuerlein / State by State GardeningFor a gentle slope or berm that connects a wooded area with your open lawn, create a smooth transition with groundcovers that naturalize and create a colorful carpet. The soil will drain quickly on a berm, so treat it like a rock garden and use plants such as creeping phlox, alpines, perennial geraniums, and tiny bellflowers. Using flowers in white and soft pastels will keep the cool feel of the woodland. You can extend the color past the spring bloomers with white and yellow variegated foliage.
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Low-Maintenance Plants for a Hillside Garden
The Spruce / Marie IannottiRunoff is one of the biggest challenges with hillside gardens and even more so when the slope runs off into the driveway, where soil can settle.
Choose plants that will anchor the hillside, such as shrubs, ornamental grasses, and prairie plants, like coneflower, that form a mat of roots. All these plants hold the ground in place and require minimal maintenance during the growing season. They can even be left standing for winter interest. With a bit of thought when choosing your plants, any hillside or slope can become a focal point in your yard.
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Metshin appreciated the improvement of the yard in Yagodnaya Sloboda
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Today Mayor of Kazan Ilsur Metshin assessed the results of improvement the territory of houses No.
35 and 37 on the street. Yagodinskaya. It was the first in 2022 to be updated under the presidential program "Our Yard". Sidewalks have been repaired, laid new asphalt, trash bins and new lamps installed, 14 parking lots added places and built children's and sports grounds with high-quality coverage. garbage cans will close the wall of grapes. Entrances renovated with the help of environmentally friendly materials, signs with numbers are highlighted.
In the houses that surround this yard, people live in total about 300 people, but the mayor stressed that improvement here is no less important than in courtyards for thousands of residents. “Earlier, the motto of Kirovsky was “Is there any life?". Your work and the love of the inhabitants for their yard shows that this life is not just there, but the berries will bloom and the children will be happy to run around, ”said Metshin.
Head of administration of Kirovsky and Moskovsky district Sergey Mironov reported that it was important for the architects and authors of the concept to keep originality of the Yagodnaya Sloboda area. The houses were decorated with drawings of berries, ceramic the sculpture of the family on the facade of the house was preserved and supplemented. The residents themselves participated in the repair of the yard - they coordinated the improvement plan with them, they also came out with the initiative to plant raspberry bushes. The two even agreed abandon the garages, in the place of which they put a playground. “When residents are involved in the work, the result is different, with energy, people themselves are more careful relate to the space around them,” the mayor believes.
Photo: Anastasia Elizarova
Residents of the houses are satisfied with the changes: in a conversation with BUSINESS Online, they appreciated that the courtyard has become safer thanks to the lighting, and neighbors' children also come to the new playground.
“A lot of work remains, but residents know what year we will come to them with a major overhaul of the house, yard, school and kindergarten, ”concluded mayor.
Photo: Anastasia Elizarova
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Residents of Volgograd presented projects for the improvement of courtyards of high-rise buildings
Representatives of the Competence Center for the Urban Environment of Volgograd, together with future architects, presented projects for renovation of the local area to residents of one of the courtyards in the Voroshilovsky District. The space is planned to be made more comfortable and comfortable.
Ideas will be made here
The yard is surrounded by four high-rise buildings on the street.
Eletskaya, 8, 10, 12 and st. Mozdokskoy, 5. The first poplars were planted here by the settlers themselves in the early 70s of the XX century. Today, Aunt Nina is called the main landscaper. She has a light hand - not only flowers take root, but also hawthorn, fruit trees. Even peaches are reaching up.
- I like doing it. I want to plant more velvet. And the oak trees have grown, we still need to find a place for them - it's a pity they only bloom late, - Nina Kravchenko tells the correspondent of Volgogradskaya Pravda.ru. – I would like our works to be preserved during the improvement. Of course, we need a good playground for children, new horizontal bars for teenagers. And it is also worth thinking about the older generation so that they can maintain a healthy lifestyle.
If possible, residents do what they can for comfort: they use car tires as fences for growing seedlings, they adapt different containers for garbage, in the absence of good benches they equip places where one could sit in the fresh air.
- We have been living here for five years. The eldest daughter is eight years old, the baby is five months old. Here everything is destroyed or broken, so we go for a walk in other yards. But I would like in my all the same. But the problem is not only the lack of a modern playground, - Tatyana Gracheva shares with us. - Here is the sports box - we have never seen it involved ... We also need parking spaces for cars.
In search of cool practices
Future architects saw and appreciated this whole situation when completing the task of developing the concept of yards. By the way, for the first time they designed real territories with complicity mechanisms. The result was several projects.
- It is important that students immediately integrate into real work, because the speed of development of technology, approaches to design and its scope is high. And if this is not done, then graduates will leave the university completely unprepared for real work,” explained Dmitry Selivokhin, chief architect of the Competence Center for Urban Environment.
- The leadership of the Volgograd university offered to discuss ideas directly with the residents. The selected works show three global trends, and it is possible to integrate each of the ideas here.
According to him, today everyone is looking for cool city practices. And it is important to collect the best ideas in order to transfer the most successful of them to the chief architect of Volgograd for consideration. Ultimately, the proposals can form a single project with the prospect of being included in the improvement program.
Each yard area must have passages for fire trucks and for the removal of solid waste. And you can not interrupt the pedestrian flow. Here the transit goes from the educational institution to the public transport stop.
And always a difficult dilemma - a yard without cars or a parking yard. A compromise option is guest parking or places for unloading and unloading products. At the same time, it is proposed to organize parking nearby - on the site of the same squatter building.
In each of the options, the scheme of access to the landscaped courtyard area is solved in its own way. Among the elements of filling the functional areas are children's, sports grounds, areas of the so-called quiet rest. And, of course, lighting and landscaping are provided.
Is a fairy tale also possible?
- The second option has a lot of paths and asphalt. These are straight lines, minimalism. I like the first option better. It is more comfortable and "green". True, the low level of one of the sites can create difficulties during cleaning, no matter how garbage accumulates there, - one of the residents Irina Mironova assesses the projects. - It's great that there is a discussion of projects with residents. True, there is no certainty that we will see the proposed options implemented at least partially. Our yard has already participated in the landscaping competition, but, alas, it was not chosen as the winner.
Of course, everyone was captivated by its unusualness of the third option, when functional areas are placed on the lower level of the yard and green spaces “sprout” through the canopy.
