Terrace it out
Looking out into the natural landscape, I wonder why some people would want to change what was naturally formed. Cities start to encroached towards us and we suddenly find ourselves with minimal space to create our own landscape. Flat surfaces being taken over by the cities form leaving us with ruminates of what use to be ‘rolling hills’, land left over with uneven angles can be very hard to work with.
When we have to encounter these gradients within the landform there are a few things that can be done. Planting the whole area will allow your landscape to be aesthetically pleasing however the space will be unusable, want to make your landscape beautiful as well as usable is to terraced out your landscape.
Land Building by Mike Mars
Retaining Walls
The use of different retaining walls will give you option to style your landscape to your liking. Strength will always be important when choosing materials for retaining walls, there are many types of materials that can be used to create retaining walls like concrete blocks, poured concrete, treated timbers, rocks or boulders. Some are easy to use, others have a shorter life span, but all can retain soil.
Retaining walls are structures designed to restrain soil to unnatural slopes. They are used to bound soils between two different elevations often in areas of terrain possessing undesirable slopes or in areas where the landscape needs to be shaped severely and engineered for more specific purposes like hillside farming or roadway overpasses.
Several questions must be considered in order to build the proper type of retaining wall. For example, is the soil sand, clay, or something in between? What is above the wall: a driveway or something heavier like a pool? Will the ground above or below the wall be level or sloped? What is the height of the wall? All of these factors will determine whether you will need a Gravity Retaining Wall or a Reinforced Retaining Wall.
Gravity retaining walls are walls that depend on their own weight and setback to retain the soil and are typically shorter in height.
Reinforced retaining walls are walls that use some type of reinforcement to give more strength to the retaining wall structure, thus improving its ability to retain the soils behind it.
