Do It Yourself Hillside Landscape With Waterfalls

Assessing Your Hillside

• According to the Las Pilitas Nursery in San Luis Obispo, California, it is important to know what kind of soil you have to work with. Assess your hillside. If it covers a large area, you need to consider the possibility of soil erosion. Before you begin to design your landscape, ask yourself these questions: Is the ground stable? Are you working with sticky clay, or is the soil loamy, sandy or rocky? Is the slope gentle or steep? Are there existing rocks, trees or other plant life you will retain to help stabilize the soil? Terracing is an effective solution to erosion, and can aid in moisture retention. Terracing your hillside also creates level areas for trees, plants or other features, and can simplify maintenance. If your hillside is steep, include timber or stone landscape steps in your design.

Choosing Style and Theme

• Choose a style, and develop a theme for your hillside garden. Style is the kind of garden you have in mind -- formal or informal. Theme can be based on color, place (tropical, woodsy, etc.) or the mood you want to create. Attune your landscape to the architecture of your home, its inside decor as well. According to William Harrison, a landscape architect at Harrison Design Associates in Atlanta, Georgia, the home and grounds must work together. If your home is of tropical design, reflect that in your grounds and waterfalls. Keep in mind that nothing in nature is uniform. If you can discern a course that water would be likely to use to flow down your hillside, a series of waterfalls along this natural course will seem less contrived than any you could design.

Working With Nature

• Do strive for proportional balance in your landscape, but avoid the unnaturalness of too much symmetry. Whether you are working with rocks, or plants or the design of your series of waterfalls, you don't need mirror images of everything. If you have one large boulder at one side of your spillway, use three smaller ones in varied sizes on the other side. This achieves balance without replication. According to Steve Boulden at S&S Designed Landscaping in Carlsbad, New Mexico, unity is your goal. Trees, plants, rocks and any other features you include in your design must blend together comfortably. Knowing these basic principles of landscape design does not limit your creativity, but it does give you some direction when uncertainties arise.

Buying Supplies and Getting to Work

• Knowing what you need, and where to get it is a big part of any do-it-yourself project. Hillside Landscape Inc., in Glenview, Illinois, suggests watertight liners for streambeds and waterfall pond bottoms. This 45-millimeter "fabric" is made of fish-safe rubber, but if you really want to do it yourself, concrete can serve you well. Whether your need is for cement, pond liners, filters and pumps, or for trees, shrubs, stones and boulders, home improvement guide directories provide locations of suppliers for all landscaping materials and equipment.