How to fix a sloping garden
It's a blessing, not a curse!
Welcome to Lo fi life, a cheerfully unsophisticated newsletter about gardening, cooking and things that are good. Not subscribed yet? Click the button:
Notes:
Today’s newsletter is free to all subscribers (I hope you enjoy it!)
Want to fix your crappy soil, grow a rambling Australian cottage garden, plant your own low-maintenance food crops and cook with fresh, homegrown produce?
Consider upgrading to a paid membership or becoming a member of my Wild Garden club. You’ll get instant access to my library of garden guides, courses, video tours and recipes - all the tools you need (except for a trowel and a spade) to grow the garden of your dreams!
To upgrade your membership or join the Wild Garden Club, click the button below.
Have you got a sloping garden? Are you totally, entirely sick of it? Yes? Good.
Call me a drama queen but…without adequate intervention, a sloping garden is a DOOMED wasteland. A slippery disservice to root systems, an affront to planting schemes and a harbinger of plant frailty.
But often, people don’t even realise that the slopes in their garden are the problem. It’s an element of your garden design that is easy to overlook, but actually really impactful on both the look and feel of your garden, and the health of your plants.
So today we’re talking garden slopes. What’s wrong with them, and what to do about them to ERADICATE THEM FOREVER.
Why slopes kind of suck
You might be surprised that I am taking such a hard line against sloping garden beds. I realise this is a fairly strong critique. And if you haven’t spent a long time attempting to garden on a slope you might not even see what the problem is.
But if you have spent a while doing battle with a sloped bed, you’ll know where I’m coming from.
Sloped beds lead to excess run-off, rendering large patches of garden soil dry, sandy and barren
Dry, sandy soil on a slope will inevitably slip down, exposing plants’ roots and making them sad
They’re also not. very. pretty.
Sloped beds are (largely) antithetical to gardening success. Mostly because they create a situation in your garden that is always slightly …tense. Do you remember learning about kinetic and potential energy in high school physics? I remember my teacher holding a golf ball very still and high in the air and asking us how much energy it had. At first glance the ball appears to have no energy - it’s totally still - but then he opened his fist and the ball dropped to the ground. Held aloft, the ball had no kinetic energy, but it was filled with potential energy, just waiting to plummet back to earth. It’s like that in your sloped garden beds. Everything you add to the top of the slope is just waiting, waiting, waiting to slide back down to the lowest point in your garden - to its lowest energy state.
And so, when you’re working in a sloped garden, gravity is always pulling on your soil, and your water, and your plants. It stresses me out just thinking about it.
In a sloped garden, without clever tactical intervention, you’ll get dry soil up top and landslides down the bottom. You’ll have relentless run off, your mulch will slowly but surely slip down the side of the beds. Your soil will drop down too, exposing the roots of the plants you planted higher up. If your bed slopes down onto a path, your path will invariably be covered in soil half the time.
Now, obviously slopes come in varying degrees. There are gradual slopes and sharp slopes. I’m going to take a firm position on this and say that no slopes are good in your garden beds; although you can usually get away with a very slight slope, it’s much better to have none at all. When your garden bed is perfectly level, rainfall and irrigation will sink into the soil evenly. The soil will remain wherever you left it, with no slumping down, and your plants will have a better chance to spread their roots evenly out into the soil.
But the main reason I don’t like slopes is that when you leave slopes in your garden you are missing an easy opportunity to create one of the BEST landscaping design features in your garden…
LEVELS!!!!
That’s right! Levels! If you have a sloped garden you should consider yourself VERY lucky. Slopes are a pain to work with, but if you are prepared to put in the effort to turn you turn your slopes into terraced levels, you will be able to create an infinitely more interesting and beautiful garden than you might have achieved if your entire garden was perfectly flat.
To begin our discussion on the value of levels, I direct your attention to one of the great thinkers of our time: Cosmo Kramer.
JERRY: What’s all this about?
KRAMER: I’m completely changing the configuration of the apartment. You’re not going to believe it when you see it - a whole new lifestyle!
JERRY: What’re you doing?
KRAMER: Levels.
JERRY: Levels?
KRAMER: I'm getting rid of all my furniture. All of it. And I'm going to build these different levels. With steps. And it'll all be carpeted. With a lot of pillows. You know, like ancient Egypt.
JERRY: You drew up plans for this?
KRAMER: No. No, it’s all in my head.
Is Kramer a genius or a fool? We may never know. What I do know is that, in the context of your garden, levels are UNBEATABLE.
Why gardens need levels
Why are levels such a game changer in your garden?
First up, they’ll solve all your sloping bed problems in one fell swoop. There’s a reason Italian families have, for centuries, been terracing the sloped hillsides that they farm on. And it’s not just because it looks lovely. No more slopes means no run-off, no landslides, no pools of water on low-lying sections in winter, happier plants and easier gardening.
If you’ve got a sloped garden and you don’t want to add levels, you have to plant and landscape really tactically. You may need to add boulders to help retain parts of the slope, grow plants that are low-growing, with root systems to help hold the soil together, devise clever irrigation methods that limit run off, improve drainage in low-lying areas and keep relentlessly shifting soil and mulch back up to the high points like some Sisyphean nightmare. None of these things are necessary if you simply divide your slope up into levels and retain each level with a pretty wall!
But the real reason I love adding levels to a garden is they just make it look SO much more beautiful.
Before we started working on our garden, the entire thing was sloped. Not hugely sloped - it didn’t present a massive technical problem, but it was sloped nonetheless. Over the years, our landscaping experiments have led to a series of levels and I’ve experienced first-hand just how much more beautiful a garden looks when it has high-points and low-points.
Adding levels improves garden design.
Adding levels allows you to divide your garden into sections or ‘rooms’. This can help make small gardens feel bigger, and it can also help make large gardens less intimidating or overwhelming to work in (you can focus on planting just one level at a time).
Levels also add height and vertical interest to your garden; they offer different vantage points for you to enjoy your garden from. We have seating areas at both the high and low points of our garden. Each spot has a totally different view of the garden, bringing out different areas of interest.
What’s more, a levelled garden is usually better to look at from your house because you can take in more of it at once. Whether your garden steps down and away or up and away from your house you can watch it spread out below or above you - you won’t be looking through as many plants as they will be on different tiers, meaning you see more plants overall. This can make your garden prettier and more interesting to look out at from your house or verandah.
Levels help with your plant choices.
Levels help show off plants that would otherwise get lost in your garden beds. Some plants really need to be enjoyed at eye level. Small plants (like pansies, violas, petunias and other low-growing ground covers) tend to just get lost in garden beds, and you rarely even notice them if they are planted at ground level. More often than not, I find they lead to gardens that look chaotic and ‘bitty’.
When planted in raised beds, however, it’s a different story. In raised beds, these plants can be enjoyed at (or near) eye-level, finally getting the attention they deserve. Ground covers that would otherwise creep messily around your garden can cascade down your retaining walls in full glory. Retaining walls give you a whole new bunch of planting options in your garden, meaning you can grow a wider and more interesting variety of plants.
You can add steps!
Oh, steps are such a beautiful feature in a garden! And if your garden isn’t too sloped, they are actually quite easy to add. Like archways, steps really help to separate your garden into rooms, drawing you into the garden to explore all its different sections and making for a more dynamic and inviting garden (also putting little pots of spring flowers on your steps is SO PRETTY).
Levels can separate different planting zones.
Levels offer you an extra opportunity to divide your garden into planting zones. This can help you build different ‘moods’ or atmospheres into your garden, making it an interesting and dynamic space to move through. It can also make it easier to work out which plants suit different spots in your garden (perhaps one level tends to get more sun, while the other is shady - you can select your plants accordingly).
How to add levels to your garden
Suss out your slope.
First, determine how steep your slope is. This will help you work out what kind of retaining walls you’ll need. For gentle slopes you can get away with some nice big bricks (we use limestone blocks for our gentler slopes - a single layer helps retain a difference of about 10cm of soil - and they’re heavy enough that they don’t need to be cemented in, which suits me because it means I can shift them around and play with new designs whenever I like!). Railway sleepers also work well for adding steps into gentle slopes.
For steeper slopes you will likely need to build in something more permanent. We have a ~1m retaining wall separating the first (lower) section of our garden from the higher back section. My husband built it two years ago with heavy jarrah sleepers from an old jetty (they still had spiky coral mollusc things attached to them when we got them!).
You can build retaining walls out of bricks, limestone, railway sleepers or any material you like. We liked the railway sleepers because (like the limestone blocks we use in other sections of the garden) they didn’t have to be concreted in, meaning they are - technically - still movable if we decide to change the garden up entirely one day (always a possibility!).
Dig, dig, dig
Once you’ve decided how much earth you need to retain, the only thing you really need to do is shift it. This is easier said than done - you might be surprised at just how much soil you’ll wind up with when you start shifting it around your garden. Slopes are deceptive - they look like they contain a lot less soil than they do.
Bear in mind, also, that this is a job best done in autumn or winter, because it will likely make your garden look like a mud-bomb has hit it. Landscaping your garden (if you’re landscaping a large section of it) usually makes it look a lot worse before it gets better, and gardens never look great in winter so you may as well double down and do it now.
Also if you’re going to be shifting huge amounts of soil you reaaaally want to avoid doing it on a 38˚C day. Now is the perfect time to do it! Grit your teeth and get stuck in, because it will be worth it.
If you wind up with more soil than you expected and you’re OK with the ‘mud-bomb’ aesthetic over winter, consider using the extra soil to top dress any sections of lawn that might not be totally level. Gradually top dressing lawn throughout the year is a great way to use the soil and also to get your lawn perfectly level, which leads to healthier grass (no pools of water in low-spots) and is generally a lot prettier.
At this point I suppose I could offer other pieces of advice like ‘make sure to use a spirit level’ and ‘measure everything out before you start’, but that would be entirely disingenuous because I NEVER do any of that myself. I tend to lay the outline of my new garden beds (or levels) using bricks and other random bits of garden detritus. Then I stand back, decide whether or not I like it, and if I decide I do like it that’s pretty much the extent of my garden planning.
If you want to be more precise that is your prerogative, but if you want to go rogue with a shovel and only a vague idea of what you’re doing, that’s fine with me too - many of my favourite garden decisions have been made on the fly, caked in mud and thoroughly enjoying myself, yours might be too.
Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!
Did you know you can give gift subscriptions to my newsletter? If you know someone who would enjoy this newsletter too, you can buy them a subscription as a gift by clicking the button below! :-)