Sunset Hillside Landscaping
By Susan Lang, Sunset Books
This all-inclusive edition explores landscaping solutions for properties with everything from slight slopes to extreme vertical challenges. Combining creative planning with practical application, Hillsides Landscaping offers easy-to-follow guidelines for designing plant beds and terraces, private steps and paths, serene seating areas, and soothing waterfalls on slopes of varying degrees. A Guide to Planting covers plant selection and installation, and includes advice on erosion control, plants for walls and crevices, and other special considerations.
A pillow-book for gardeners 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. Lots of pic's but no help for do it yourself homeowners I live in Southern California where there are hills galore. I thought the book showed very pretty pictures and has nice planting tips, but it wasn't very helpful for homeowneres like my husband and I who wanted to try and landscape ourselves. I also purchased a book called Inspirational Terracing which was able to help my husband and I really landscape our yard ourselves with instructions and wonderful ideas for any situation and the author built all the landscapes himself, using afordable stones that the average person can lift. The book has beautiful pictures and it was very useful. It made me wonder how Hillside Landscaping got all their pictures, I think anyone can drive around and take pictures of landscapes that other people have built and work hard to maintain and beautify and turn around and make money off of other peoples hard efforts. It seemed more like a magazine than a book,it had beautiful scenery but used only materials that top notch contractors with huge equiptment, charging heafty prices could pull off. These landscapes are not for the person with an average house, only the upper class, homeowners could never afford these landscapes and nearly all of them could never be attempted by the homeowner. Great addition to any landscaping book collection I just received this book today and have been unable to put it down. I never expect to be so impressed with a book in this price range, but I highly recommend it for anyone who is serious about landscaping and has to deal with hills or slopes.Having just recently purchased some hillside property, I was looking for the kind of book that would help me and my land partners develop this in the fashion we want. This book gives me much more than I could ever imagine. Not only is it chalk full of great suggestions for developing practically EVERY kind of sloped surface, but it great tips on garden design, plant choice, decks, multi-leveled lawns, walkways (all types), retaining walls and much, much more. There are also loads of great instructions and diagrams to help anyone from beginner to expert. The second chapter, "Inspiring Ideas," is worth the price of the book alone. Yes, the photos are sometimes a bit small, but there are so many good ones here of, in some cases, some of the cleverest landscapes I've ever seen that it more than compensates for any photographic shortcomings.Hard to go wrong with this book. Really. Highly recommended for anyone who has to deal with this type of landscape.
