Artistic Hillside

Landscapers carved out a masterpiece from rubble.

To sculpt a luscious retreat where the homeowners could host VIP parties, while also having space to camp out with their young daughters, Tobi Wilde, Glorious Earth Landscapes’ landscape designer/earth sculptress, used strokes of artistic creativity to erase what was once “rubble, chaos, confusion and mishap.”

She saw this project as a canvas for “major art. There was this huge mountain in someone’s backyard that I could sculpt into tiers, creating areas for various uses,” Wilde says. With her team, she added a fire pit with a Kiva-style seating area, native grass meadow, pathways and steps leading to stone bench gathering spots.

Topping it all off was a bench at the top of the backyard that surveyed the entire property. The original water feature was leaking and lacking a cohesive design, so Wilde remodeled the structure.

She created an elegant waterfall that cascaded under the stone footbridge, around the boulders and down the stream to the Koi pond. Finishing touches, added by Adam Steinberg, included a butyl rubber liner and biological filtration system for the water feature.

Her pallet of materials included Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico flagstone, recycled brick, local river boulders and stones.

The meadow was seeded and plug planted with a blue grama/buffalo grass mix with a back-up sprinkler system for germination and times of drought.

They also installed various native and non-native perennial plants and trees.

Project: Private residence, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Landscaping: Glorious Earth Landscape, Santa Fe, New Mexico, gloriousearthlandscapes.com

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