Garden, Retaining & Free-Standing Walls

Adding a wall to your landscape can add value in both function and beauty.  Walls fall into three main categories: garden, retaining, and free-standing walls.

Garden walls delineate a focal point for all kinds of landscape features including bushes and flowers, vegetables, rock gardens, fountains, and water features. In addition to drawing attention to the area, a garden wall elevates the garden making it easier to maintain.

Retaining walls serve a specific function: to keep something in place.  Examples include keeping dirt from sliding down a slope onto a patio or driveway, keeping water from escaping a creek or ditch, and holding a raised patio in place.  Even though highly functional, a retaining wall can also add beauty to the landscape.

Free-standing walls usually border some part of a patio or pool deck either to create physical separation (privacy walls) or to create an additional place to sit (seating walls).

A plethora of both manufactured and natural stone options exist for building walls. Retaining walls have the most demanding requirements on material design, making them generally bigger and heavier than other wall products. Retaining wall products always feature some kind of locking mechanism to help hold them in place. (Natural stone does not naturally lock together so it is rarely used for a retaining wall unless as a veneer.) As a by-product of these design factors, any material suitable for a retaining wall may also be used for a garden wall. 

Garden walls support the least physical pressure, so many garden wall products are small and light and have significant limitations for broader use.  Free-standing walls have the key requirement of looking the same from both sides. 

Wall products come in many textures, colors, and finishes – and with a huge price range. Double-sided manufactured products are the most expensive of the wall materials since they are the most complex to produce.