Before & After: 4 Great Outdoor Makeovers in Oddly Shaped Gardens

1. Walled-in canyon becomes an inviting outdoor living space

Designer: Seed Studio Landscape Design
Size: Total exterior space is 65 square metres
Location: San Francisco, USA

Before: This San Francisco side yard had good bones, including existing cedar fencing and slate pavers, but it felt more like a walled-in pen than an inviting garden.

After: Landscape designer Steve Ritchey treated the side yard more as an indoor-outdoor living room than as a planted garden. He added wooden crossbeams overhead to create an outdoor ceiling, emphasising the room-like feeling of the courtyard.

Instead of breaking up the slate patio into planting areas, Ritchey kept the floor space open, save for one area for a Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) in the corner.

He added planter boxes at the top of the fence filled with blue chalk sticks (Senecio mandraliscae), island alumroot (Heuchera maxima) and western sword fern (Polystichum munitum). This created a cascade of foliage and an attractive view from upstairs windows.

New stepping stones set in gravel help alleviate the canyon-like feeling of the pathway leading to the small back garden.

After: A welcoming patio set off the back of the house provides a viewing area to appreciate the much more dynamic garden. Designer Fiona Green used a series of interlocking circles to define areas of lawn and planting beds. A cobblestone path meanders between the different areas like the path of a river down a valley, drawing one’s eye from side to side rather than just straight down the yard.

The central position of a Japanese maple in a circular bed halfway down the garden gently interrupts the sightline and encourages a visual pause.

While the steep slope presented a major initial challenge, the terraced design has turned the vertical drop into an asset. The elevation change separates areas while keeping views of the gorge uninterrupted from every level.

Here, in the bottom meadow section of the garden, gentle rock retaining walls prevent erosion down the hillside to the ravine, and a hanging swing seat provides one more place where someone can hang out and enjoy the view.

After: The new garden offers spaces for outdoor living, entertaining and quiet contemplation – ticking all the boxes on the homeowners’ wish list. A decomposed gravel path winds through multiple garden spaces; it starts at a fire pit patio, then curves around a flagstone labyrinth, then moves past a native meadow garden and finally ends at a kitchen garden, set off by a redwood arbour.

Plantings include many California natives, including California poppies (Eschscholzia californica), toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) and western redbud (Cercis occidentalis), as well as low-water staples such as rosemary and agave. The climate-appropriate plantings offer far more to local pollinators and wildlife – and interest for the homeowners – than the expanse of clipped grass did before.