Reducing soil erosion, turning steep slopes into terraced backdrops, creating focal points in the landscape—retaining walls serve many purposes. Indeed, they are some of the most common ways to ...

Last week I wrote about my recent trip to Southern California. I was fortunate to spend time with a dear friend and his wife. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a person who’s more in love with a home ...

Question: Everyone in my subdivision uses man-made blocks for the retaining walls they installed on the sloping parts of their yards. I do not like the look of these concrete blocks and want to use ...

A dry stone wall is a purposeful pile of rocks, held in place by friction and gravity rather than mortar. It’s one of the oldest building methods known to mankind, used over millennia to construct ...

My grandfather was a baker in Cincinnati in the very early 1900s. He and my grandmother owned and operated a neighborhood bakery in the Clifton Heights neighborhood just 400 feet from where I was born ...

Q. I want to build a retaining wall that’s going to look great for years. At my last house, I had a short retaining wall around a patio that started to lean out toward the lawn. The little wall was ...

Q: My beautiful stone retaining wall has sprung leaks during these recent rainstorms. How can I fix the problem? Rockville, Md. A: Your wall is probably just fine. If it were a leakproof dam without ...