Steps add drama and ease movement around the garden

There's no getting away from it, New Zealand is a pretty hilly country. Our fabulous landscape and stunning views come with sloping, steep and even precipitous gardens. These sites have a big need to handle changes of level in designing a garden, giving rise to some fantastic design opportunities and practical headaches. The transformation of a sloping path or bank when steps are added is dramatic. Suddenly the slope has a purpose, was meant to be there. You can see from our photos that adding steps totally changes the look and atmosphere of a garden.
A hillside garden is not a disadvantage, although some sections resemble a cliffside more than a garden. A change of level offers an opportunity to use steps and terracing to define separate garden areas, mark a transition from one garden 'room' to another, and to create a feature. Steps have an ornamental as well as a practical purpose. On flat sites designers frequently create levels, importing soil to do so, or cut and fill on gently sloping sites to create the illusion of a change in levels. A steep site can be left as a grass bank, but difficulty in mowing and the absence of a flat site for spending time in the garden may lead to terracing, linked by steps. Steps are used in many gardens, some steep and some comparatively flat. You need to be able to get around the garden, and on sloping site steps are one of the most practical ways of getting about. In steep garden steps are almost inevitable. And steps make so much more of the design. Anyone with a flat garden will envy the changes of level possible and the opportunities to mark transitions in the garden using steps. The gradient of the slope and the size of the garden will dictate much of the impact on the steps on the garden design, but planting can be used to soften and the style of the steps will also influence the degree to which they dominate the garden design. Remember that, as you are more conscious of your footing outdoors than in, garden steps that are slightly uneven can still be safe, but very uneven steps will be slow and tedious to negotiate.