Mini Makeover: Alex's Layered Hillside
Last updated: Sep 02 2022
Key takeaways
Transform a difficult hillside by layering trees, shrubs, ornamental grasses, and perennials to create depth, improve visual interest, and reduce the appearance of steep slopes.
Choose plants with different heights, textures, and colors to build a balanced landscape that offers year-round beauty while helping stabilize sloped planting areas.
Replace hard-to-maintain turf on steep hillsides with low-maintenance landscape plants that require less mowing and are easier to care for over time.
Talk about a Transformation Tuesday! Watch along as Zone 7b home gardener, Alex, from @graycedarhome shares her recent landscape makeover! With a hard-to-mow, weed-filled hillside in need of a little help, Alex wanted to redesign and reimagine her space to make it more usable and more attractive. So, with the help of her kiddos, she got to work clearing and filling her space with some of her favorite perennials to create a beautified area for her and her family to appreciate!
Alex chose an assortment of Limelight Hydrangeas, Blue Angel Hostas, Blush Pink Nandinas, Palace Purple Heucheras and Wide Brim Hostas to enhance her hillside and create easygoing color and interest. From start to finish, the project took her about one week to complete. And despite some summer rain delays, she was still able to complete the transformation quite quickly.
Alex’s favorite part of the process was picking out her plant pairings and playing with varying sizes, textures and color hues to bring her garden bed together. We’re big fans of how she layered in her shrubs and topped it all off with pine straw to compete the look. And we especially love how she included her kids to make it a family activity!
As a busy mom of three, ease and convenience is important to Alex when it comes to home projects and gardening, which is why she appreciates getting quality plants delivered directly to her front door. Alex made her hillside transformation look so fun and easy, taking it from 0 to 100 with just a few simple steps, and now she has a “gorgeous garden bed that [her] family can enjoy for years to come!"
With the rights plants, you can take any area of your yard from drab to fab too. Dig into the rest of our Mini Makeovers Series for more inspiring and easy-to-achieve garden transformations!
Learn more about Alex from @graycedarhome and shop her plant picks below!
Written by
Sarah Logie
As Content Strategist at FastGrowingTrees.com, Sarah is smitten with words and a fanatic for flowers, particularly cut florals and house plants. With a love for curating compelling content, she also enjoys furthering her plant knowledge along the way! A few of her favorite flowers include hibiscus, hydrangeas, peonies and dahlias.
Sarah’s fondness for plants was cultivated through many childhood trips to Longwood Gardens in southeastern Pennsylvania, as well as through her first job out of college at a floral event design company. In her free time, catch her snapping photos of anything and everything, day-dreaming about interior decor, and enjoying the outdoors any chance she gets.
