Terraces - The economics of ecology

by Richard McCutcheon and Mike Hillebrecht

Landscape projects these days, both large and small, are placing a higher demand on the professional to address issues associated with moderate to steep slopes. Unlike small sloped sites where a variety of landscape features and materials can be incorporated into an overall design, steep slopes limit a number of these features. One method that is being employed in these conditions is introducing terraces into the landscape design. The following shows you some of the factors involved in planning a terracing project.

Eliminate Erosion

Across the nation, more development is occurring in areas that traditionally were not thought of as acceptable terrain for a building. This has opened a whole new series of ecological concerns within various municipalities. Properly designed terraces help to manage difficult hillsides by providing definition to the terrain. The benefit to this is that it can often reduce or eliminate existing site erosion. This can be an important design consideration especially if your local municipality has strict guidelines established to control hillside erosion on new projects. By effectively using terraces in a project, steep slopes can be reduced considerably and allow more traditional landscape materials to be used. Terraces also open up a hillside to more planting space for yards or gardens.

Built-in value: Benches

When creating terraces on a steep slope for a homeowner, a detail that can be a benefit to you and a convenience for the customer is constructing a series of terraces that can also be used as a bench. These benches will create a friendly environment within a yard should your client do a lot of entertaining, as well as provide a place of rest when they are maintaining the planting beds that these small terraces create. Small terrace walls - between 18 inches to 26 inches high - are more aesthetically pleasing than one or possibly two large terrace walls and often are more cost effective too, since they don’t require massive amounts of backfilling or material movement.

Part 2 - Materials