Am having this overgrown old sloped garden dug out and the soil replaced. It’s full of roots, some poison ivy and had a lot of old brush that is mostly raked away. I’m leaving some of the live brush in the back there. I’m zone 5b.
My initial thought was to plant wildflowers – but tried some ideas on ai for inspiration. It’s a big area and the landscaping to clean it out is expensive to have it just fill in with weeds again (my fear).
What would you do? What’s a good end goal for this space?
by rosewingedparakeet
5 Comments
Why not BOTH the stream/waterfall AND the flowers? Mowing grass on an upper terrace is a pain (ask me how I know…).
The Girl Scouts
Budget?
Digging out and replacing soil on a slope is an open invitation for severe erosion and an absolute weed explosion. Tossing a bag of wildflower seeds up there is just going to give you a messy headache full of the same poison ivy and brush you just paid to remove. You need deep roots to hold that bank together and thick canopies to shade out the weed seeds that blow in. A wildflower meadow on a bare slope is never a simple set it and forget it project.
Skip the scattered flower look and plant in sweeping connected masses. Get aggressive native shrubs and heavy ornamental grasses up there to create real structure. Think large swaths of switchgrass mixed with gro low sumac or creeping junipers depending on your light. You want structural plants that flow together into one solid groundcover to outcompete the junk. Once you get them in the ground cover every inch of that bare dirt with a thick layer of coarse arborist wood chips to lock down the soil and smother the weeds.
Those generic AI images you posted look pretty but they do not give you a real functional plan for a retaining wall slope. Before you spend a dime on nursery stock you should run a photo of that cleared bank through the GardenDream web app. It acts like a safety net tool to help you visualize actual constructible mass plantings and layouts so you know exactly what works before you waste your landscape budget.
Where in zone “5b”? That’s just a winter temp measurement, not an indication of rainfall and summer temps.
* You do NOT need total soil replacement! The fill dirt will be crap compared to what you have now, and full of weed seeds, and it will settle awkwardly and as others mentioned, probably erode.
* How will you mow the upper terrace? Is there a path to get the mower up there?
* If you want low maintenance, a pond and waterfall feature is NOT the way to go.
* You can kill off poison ivy selectively, you don’t have to bring in a backhoe.
* Identify the “brush” by species … some may be desirable, some will not.
* Put a 6-8 inch layer of wood chips (see chipdrop.com) over the area while you plan and locate resources. It will kill off a lot of weeds,
I would add rock steps to get to the upper part, add flagstones to a small area under the trees and make a reading and wine sipping nook with a flagstone path reading to it.
Then I would turn the entire upper bit into a “mixed border” sort of bed, with some small ornamental trees (dogwoods? nine-bark? whatever is small and native), shrubs, some trailing ground cover overflowing the wall and native grasses and wildflowers.
Think of it as a multi-year project, not a once-and-done.