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 ...

Before you start building a stone retaining wall, it's important to assess your garden's landscape and determine where the ...

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 want to build a retaining wall that’s going to look great for years. At my last house, I had a short retaining wall around a patio that started to lean out toward the lawn. The little wall was ...

It’s tragic to spend the time and money to build a retaining wall only to have it fail. Unstable walls can be dangerous; at the very least they are a discouraging waste of resources. Over the years we ...

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 ...

Highlights The typical cost range to build a railroad tie retaining wall falls between $2,000 and $2,400, while the national average cost is $2,200. The main factors that affect the total cost of this ...

After enduring nearly 25 years of weeds, washouts and a less-than-captivating view from the kitchen window, Hank and Candi Koehler decided they'd had enough. "We had a concrete wall, broken concrete, ...

A dry stone wall is a purposeful pile of rocks, held in place by friction and gravity rather than mortar. It’s one of the oldest building methods known to mankind, used over millennia to construct ...

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 ...

Cascading plants are brilliant for awkward or overlooked spaces. Whether you’re planting a raised bed, a sloping bank, a low wall or a few hanging baskets, these trailing species make the most of ...