Ours is an fluid landscape and all its houses, merely mobile homes. For those of us who live in the hills, it seems as though we live upon soils that have long been bored with their current ...

The desire to have a bit of land to call your own is not an uncommon one. However, in the Bay Area, finding our own personal outdoor space can be a challenge. Some of us live in newer housing ...

Last week I wrote about my recent trip to Southern California. I was fortunate to spend time with a dear friend and his wife. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a person who’s more in love with a home ...

I want to build a three-foot-high retaining wall behind my house out of pressure-treated wood. Thoughts?—Shawn B., Sioux City, Iowa Go ahead, but do your homework. First, call 811 before you dig. The ...

Reducing soil erosion, turning steep slopes into terraced backdrops, creating focal points in the landscape—retaining walls serve many purposes. Indeed, they are some of the most common ways to ...

There's a lot to love about a stackable retaining wall in your backyard. If your yard has an uneven slope, a retaining wall can add usable space to your outdoor areas and increase the value of your ...

Humans have been building retaining walls for thousands of years to create flat, or gently sloping, terraces on hillsides. A lot of my readers have them on their own property — or need to build one — ...

Q: I have two deteriorating (but still standing) retaining walls made of timber and two even worse, leaning cinder-block retaining walls. I was planning to replace them all eventually, but to spread ...

Retaining walls are the foundation of a beautiful and stable lakefront view. They can turn an eroding hill into a series of terraces, adding usable space to an otherwise wasted piece of cramped ...

Garden retaining walls should, it seems, be made out of stone. By its very nature, stone is at ease in the garden; stone walls have a strength and soft irregularity that embrace and guide a garden ...