GBDW – Coping with Slopes Wrap-Up

– Posted in: Garden Design

Boulder at Rockydale

We’ve gotten some fantastic contributions for this month’s Design Workshop – solid how-to advice as well as a wealth of design ideas. So without further ado, on to the links…

Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop – Coping with Slopes (Nan at Gardening Gone Wild): Kick-off post for this month’s topic.

How It All Began (VP at Veg Plotting): As part of her Open Garden blog, Veep showed the “before” pictures of her steeply sloping property, explained the planning process for turning it into useable space, and showed the terracing process that created the lovely garden she enjoys today.

Gardening on Steep Slopes in Marin County (Michelle at Garden Porn): Sloping sites often offer the benefit of a great distance view, but they can present major challenges when it comes at trying to create a people-friendly landscape.close at hand. Michelle offers a photo essay of design solutions for several seriously sloping California hillsides.

Fun with Concrete (Frances at Fairegarden). Regular readers of Fairegarden know that Frances’ entire back yard is a serious slope, so every post has some connection to this month’s topic. But this particular link is a real gem for any gardener: besides detailing the various sorts of steps that make the area more manageable, Frances offers some great ideas for making garden accessories with concrete.

Coping with Slopes – Gardening Gone Wild’s Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshop (Heirloom Gardener): HG too lives on a sloping property, so one way or another, her entire blog relates to gardening on a slope. In this post, she’s gathered links to six entries that specifically deal with the challenges she’s encountered over the years.

Building Stone Steps for Mules and Gardens (Ryan at DryStoneGarden): Ryan takes building with stone very seriously, so it’s no surprise that he offers some rock-solid how-to advice for building stone steps in this post. And in Cabernet Stone Terracing, he talks about considerations for terracing with dry-stacked stone walls.

Coping with Slopes: Future Fruit (Dave at The Home Garden): Dave’s place includes a rather sizeable slope. It’s currently a meadowy area with mown grass paths, but Dave has big plans for its future!

My thanks to all of you who have participated in the last two years of the Garden Bloggers’ Design Workshops. We’re going to take a break for the next few months so I can do some much-needed reformatting of the wrap-up posts (some of the earliest ones, in particular, have gotten all wonky as our WordPress template has changed slightly over time), and to fix broken links. If any of you have topics you’d especially like to cover or revisit in future workshops, feel free to leave your suggestions below.

Nancy J. Ondra
Nan gardens on 4 acres in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In the firm belief that every garden ought to have a pretentious-sounding (or at least pretentious-looking) name, she refers to her home grounds as "Hayefield." There, she experiments with a wide variety of plants and planting styles, from cottage gardens and color-based borders to managed meadows, naturalistic plantings, and veggies--all under the watchful eyes of her two pet alpacas, Daniel and Duncan.
Nancy J. Ondra

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4 comments… add one

Leave a Comment

Sylvia (England) October 30, 2009, 5:31 am

Nan, I will miss these workshops but look forward to their return. I find them very useful and agree they are a great resource, so maintenance is necessary. I have used some of the ideas in my own garden, paths is one that stand outs in my memory but I have enjoyed this one as well as I have a slope on my garden.

Best wishes Sylvia (England)

I’m so glad to know that you’ve found them useful, Sylvia. We’ll start again in the spring. I think the topic of paths is definitely worth revisiting.
-Nan

VP October 30, 2009, 2:05 pm

What a great resource of ideas and solutions this month Nan (as usual) – almost makes we wish we were starting out again.

Hope the blog ‘housekeeping’ doesn’t get too taxing!

Thanks, Veep! And don’t worry, I’m sure that blog housekeeping can’t be nearly as tiresome as regular housekeeping. But it’s much needed, either way.
-Nan

ryan November 2, 2009, 3:25 am

Thanks for doing these. You’ve covered a lot of topics. I’ve looked through some of the older ones, hadn’t noticed any issues.

Hmmm…when I open them, there are some major issues with photo alignments, missing spaces between paragraphs, and so on. Maybe I ought to check them out on another computer before I start messing with them. Thanks, Ryan!
-Nan

ryan December 13, 2009, 8:49 pm

I was thinking that a lot of bloggers write about their local bot garden. Might be interesting to gather a collection of posts about bot gardens or design lessons from the bot garden, something like that.

Thanks for the idea, Ryan; I’ll add it to the list!
-Nan

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