Focus on – dry stone retaining walls
Dry stone retaining walls have one job and one job only – to hold back earth banks. Pretty simple. And with an even simpler formula of half as wide as it is high, they’re pretty straightforward pieces of stone work build.
But they can also be beautiful. And practical too – being free draining, it means they’re ideal for landscaping. Beautiful and practical? What’s not to like!
Many gardens are built on a slope. And to be honest, slopes are not ideal spaces for the gardens – they’re hard to mow if turfed and hard to walk on if planted.
The solution is to create terraces with dry stone retaining walls. Half as wide as high, capped with flat stone, vertical copes or sedum; backfill with soil and voila, you have useable space.
More of this garden is here.
Retaining walls can come in all shapes and sizes and they can definitely be used to enhace a garden.
By laying the stones vertically in this garden, the dry stone wall becomes a key landscaping feature.
With flat cap stones, the wall becomes a seat too.
More of this garden is here.
If you really want, it’s possible to dial up the artistic wow factor to 10!
This garden in Fife allowed me freedom to design and build a retaining wall made with two kinds of stone – the vertically laid Alston stone and the horizontal Caithness.
Add in large boulders with Japanese script for the seasons carved in them, and we have a lovely monument to craftmanship and design.
More on this job here.
But for most jobs the retaining wall is there to perform its job of holding back an earth bank, like this one in Perthshire.
Of course, they can still look beautiful!
More on this job here.
Stone suppliers were:
Border Aggregates and Landscape Supplies in Kelso – https://www.borderaggregates.com/
Norse Stone in Caithness – https://www.norsestone.co.uk/