Sunset Hillside Landscaping

Reader Reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) I was a flat-land gardener most of my life, and when we retired and moved to a house with a backyard that sloped steeply down to a small river, I needed ideas on how to landscape our new property. "Hillside Landscaping" is a sort of pillow book for gardeners. The majority of its beautiful photographs show landscapes that gardeners of modest means can only dream about. I used the book to point out photographs of steps and retaining walls that I liked to the local landscaping firm, then we'd have a good laugh about the price, and work out cheaper compromises. For instance, instead of stone steps I now have wooden stairs leading down to the river. Don't misunderstand me, though. There are some very good ideas in this book. For instance, we used the suggestion to zig-zag the stairs down the slope, both to make the climb a bit easier (the slope varies from about 1:6 to 1:2) and to make the journey to the river more interesting. This book is divided into five sections: * "Understanding your Terrain"--this section is very important, no matter how much money you plan to spend. It discusses types of hillsides (most especially the severity of the slope) , drainage considerations, and whether or not the landscape needs to be reshaped, e.g. terraced. * "Inspiring Ideas"--beautiful photographs of slopes, decks, patios, steps, retaining walls, water features, etc. with suggestions on placement, materials, and plantings. * "It's all in the planning"--a very useful chapter, including the ABCs of garden design, and the mechanics of plotting your property. One of this chapter's suggestions that we plan to implement is a 'dry creekbed' to drain water from our backyard slope. * "Building on slopes"--Many landscaping features such as fences are more challenging to build on a slope. This chapter explains what factors you need to consider when building or gardening on a slope. I learned NOT to pull up weeds and saplings from their downhill side, after yanking out a small alder, losing my balance, and tumbling over the dry-stone retaining wall and down the steps. It was a cheap way of conducting my own bone density scan, but I wouldn't recommend this procedure to anyone else! I was also very glad that we had decided to build the steps out of wood, not stone. * "Focusing on plants"--Erosion control. Erosion control. Erosion control. Figure out how you're going to work your beds. Use low-maintenance plants "if you want to avoid scrambling around your hillside to perform tasks such as weeding and pruning." There are suggestions on how to water on a slope--very important, and something I didn't think of when originally planning the beds. "Hillside Landscaping" is useful as well as beautiful and can be used by do-it-yourselfers as well as those of us who plan to hire the muscle to move the stones and build the steps.