Design Ideas for Garden Walls and Steps

The basic principle of good garden design is space. Your garden is a space designed for relaxing in – so good garden design involves good use of space. One of the best ways to make sense, and therefore good use, of the space in your back garden, is by introducing garden walls, steps and patio areas into the equation.

As soon as you bring walls and steps into your garden, you start to define specific areas in terms of their use. For example: if you have a patio area, which ends in a garden wall and some steps up to your lawn and flower beds, then you have very clearly signalled the intention you have for the different parts of your outside space. The walls make that intent clear in a natural way.

Because the wall is usually made of the same kind of brickwork as your home, your garden tends to carry some echoes of the house design throughout. Garden walls can be extremely useful in any garden design because of this. By extending the materials, patterns and colours of your house out through the grass, plants and patio areas of your garden (however big or small), you make sure that the garden becomes a part of the whole rather than a separate area.

Walls are obviously also used to keep things in or out of place. You can wall off parts of your garden where they are supposed to perform functions that you don’t want to be visible, too – like a composting area, for example, or a permanent barbecue.

Use garden walls to segregate vegetable patches and you can keep a tight rein on where your vegetables grow and where they stop. Little raised herb gardens and vegetable areas can look quite stunning when they have been separated with a good wall, which draws the eye to the neat squares (or triangles, or whatever shape you have chosen for yours) of plantings, and helps to provide a border that keeps everything looking tidy.

Using a garden wall and steps arrangement can help to make sense and beauty out of a garden with a pronounced slope. Rather than having your beds and plants running off up a hill you can level off areas of your garden and hold them in place with garden walls. That lets you have a pleasing tiered effect, which you can use to incorporate different things or uses at different heights. For example – you could have a patio at the lowest level or the highest; a lawn in mid levels; and even a rockery or water feature on one of the other mid range levels.