Retaining Walls

Two things make a retaining wall great: it has to hold the hill, and it has to add to the beauty of the landscape. The first is engineering — done right it lasts fifty years, done wrong it slides. The second is harder.

A deep compacted base. A first course buried below grade. Drainage stone behind every wall. Geogrid reinforcement on anything over four feet. Natural stone — limestone outcropping, weathered fieldstone, or natural boulders — each placed to lock against the course behind it.

Done right, a retaining wall doesn’t read as a wall — it reads as part of the topography. Stone with the depth and weight of something old, holding a slope it could have been part of all along. Twenty years from now, the wall will still be holding. The yard will have grown into the stone.