Garden Tour: Building into a Sloped Yard

Slopes are often long and gradual in middle Tennessee. This field drops more than two feet from one side of the garden to the other. 

When I first visited Jordan’s house in College Grove, she and her husband walked me around their sprawling property and showed me all of the options for garden placement.

Option 1: A beautiful pasture at the driveway entrance, but that would be a long walk to the kitchen. “Not ideal,” I shook my head, “I like to be able to run out for some basil while my pasta is boiling!”

Option 2: The backyard, but the pool was taking up a lot of space, and Jordan wanted to go big. She was contemplating a greenhouse and storage shed— maybe a place to put her potter’s wheel. She loved the idea of chickens, and wanted to be able to feed them garden scraps. We scratched the backyard off the list of possible garden locations.

Option 3: The side yard, near the barn, just behind a line of pine trees and next to an old apple orchard. But Jordan was worried, “It’s sloped downhill. Can we build a garden on that?” You betcha. In Tennessee, we have to build gardens on hills all of the time.

We went with option 3, and this beautiful courtyard potager was carved into the hillside.

Our work began with the help of a mini- bulldozer to move large amounts of dirt. Osbaldo cleared piles and piles of dirt, and little by little, he cut a square out of the hillside, 25 ft X 25 ft.

At that point, the guys built a retaining wall to hold back the soil where we had removed it. We used 4X4 cedar posts to hold up the two-foot wall, and we installed four elegant steps as the entrance. The garden space still sloped slightly downhill to ensure water run off, but the incline requires a squat, and bubble level, and some squinty eyes to see it.

We built 4 L-shaped cedar beds and painted them black. Then the verticals: two arches, one near the entrance steps, and one at the exit, plus four matching black obelisks on each corner. In the center, a traditional fountain, Campania International’s “Pietra” in aged limestone, which we connected to the irrigation system for easy maintenance. At its base, perennial flowers that will fill in over time and create a wild whimsy—bee blossom, pin cushion flower and phlox. The gravel at the base is local limestone chip, which complements the contemporary design.

All around the garden, we built a four-foot cattle panel fence, which we also painted black. On the low side, we planted a row of blueberries, and on the other side, a blackberry trellis. This tall, perennial greenery will soon hide this little garden from the driveway behind me— it will be a secret hillside nook.