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• Stabilizing gardens on slopes

Stabilizing gardens on slopes

Recently my company had to undergo a very difficult garden project set on one of the worse sloped gardens in Cyprus. The gradient of the slope was so steep that the staff building the garden with me had to use ropes to climb up and down in order to carry materials. The owners had just moved into Kamaras Village and they were very disappointed that they could not use the garden, as a nice garden, i.e. to walk around and admire and sit in, in the evenings. Before we began the project the garden was full of old and dying trees, old bushes and because access into the garden was so difficult, weeding was non- existent. So the challenge was, how to create a completely new garden so that the owner could walk around and enjoy the lovely plants and sit and admire the views in the evenings. The first major step was to remove and kill all the old un-pruned trees. The second task was in three stages, first we needed to stabilize the soil so that in the winter months the rain would not erode and wash the soil down the slope. It would have been possible to build the garden up by building a large retaining wall but this would have cost the owner thousands, it would have created another new plateau, however in my eyes, this would not have been an interesting garden. The answer was to build a lovely dry stone path all through the garden, creating a natural effect plus eliminating the chance of soil erosion, second was to place large boulder rocks throughout the garden so that when the plants were introduced the plants would then hold the soil, again, to stop erosion. Imagine carrying 1 x 26 tonne lorry of boulder rocks down a slope and the only foothold the staff had was hanging onto a rope for security! The final task was planting. Kamaras is renowned for very poor soil, therefore all the plants had to be planted with at least 2 foot of really good quality red top soil and compost, again each plant was planted with the workers going up and down the slope on ropes. The major importance and one reason why it would make the garden either a success or failure was the types of plants used on the slope. Because of the steepness of the slopes the plants that needed to be used had to be spreading ones, to hold the soil to stabilize the soil, therefore we chose to use a lot of dwarf spreading conifers, such as, Juniperus horizontalis, Thuju aurea nana and Pinus Mugo. We also chose to use dwarf grasses, which spread but gave a mixture of different colours, especially for the winter months, such as Festuca glauca (Blue/grey grass), Ophiopon (lush green grass), Carex (variegated yellow grass) and Bambusa nana (compact lush green mini bamboo). Because all of the above are classed as evergreen plants giving permanent green throughout the winter and summer, it was also necessary to include some spreading, compact plants that give colour thoughout the summer and winter months such as; Margarita rose (pink button flowers), Mounding Santolina’s (yellow button flowers), Osteospermum (lovely purple and white spreading flowers), spreading bush bougainvilleas, giving a dominant selection of either red flowers or pink flowers, the bush variety is not very common in Paphos but if you find it, it can be ideal to use as a colourful-spreading plant, and Felicia, with its lush green mound and lovely purple daisy-type flowers, and last but not least, a few different varieties of Lavenders to give long-lasting purple & blue flowers, ideal, but do remember, all these flowering plants need to be cut back regularly and always cut down to the last green shoots. Again all of these flowering plants will be mature in about 6 months and will look beautiful once they have spread onto the big boulder rocks and blending with the lovely dry stone path!! Obviously all of this is set on an automatic irrigation system, can’t wait to see the results in 6 months!