Charlestown Row House Garden

A rear garden behind a Charlestown row house, on the slope below Bunker Hill Monument, came with an uneven run of grade from the back door to the rear wall. The client wanted a garden usable in all four seasons — seating, planting beds, a working path — without the change in level reading as an obstacle to get across rather than a place to sit in.

The constraint

The lot drops close to three feet from the back door to the rear property line, inside a garden under twenty feet deep. On a site this size, a change in grade that large usually gets solved with a single flight of steps and a flat lower terrace, which reads as an afterthought and eats most of the usable square footage in the process. Here, the brief was to keep the whole run in use — seating near the house, planting the length of the slope, and a level spot at the back — rather than trading three-quarters of the garden for a stair run down to it.

What we did

We split the grade into two shallow terraces instead of one steep drop, each held by a low bluestone retaining wall built to a height that reads as a seat wall rather than a structure. A honed bluestone path steps down between them at a run shallow enough to walk without watching your feet, with a slightly wider landing at the turn for a pot or a place to stop.

Planting had to do double duty: hold the slope and read as a garden, not erosion control. We used:

Structure and screening: Ilex glabra (inkberry holly) along the property line, clipped loosely rather than sheared
Slope planting: Amsonia hubrichtii, Geranium ‘Rozanne’, and Carex pensylvanica worked in drifts across both terraces, chosen for root systems that knit the soil on a grade
Salt-tolerant edge planting: Rosa rugosa and Panicum virgatum along the rear wall, closest to the wind off the Navy Yard
Containers at the upper terrace: a pair of large fiberglass planters set at the kitchen door, replanted seasonally

Soil on the lower terrace was amended for drainage before planting, given how the grade concentrates runoff at the base of the slope.

How it performs now

The upper terrace holds interest from April through frost — geranium and amsonia carry spring and summer, the grasses and rugosa take over in fall, and the inkberry holds structure through winter without going bare. The lower terrace stays quieter, doing the job of anchoring the slope with the Carex filling in below the taller planting. Maintenance runs to a seasonal visit for cutback and edging, a mid-summer check on the containers, and an eye on the retaining walls each spring after freeze-thaw. Nothing on this site depends on a sprinkler running on a schedule that doesn’t match the weather.

Services used on this project

This project combined garden design and installation with the retaining wall and terrace work, fine gardening and ongoing maintenance for the seasonal program described above, and drip irrigation run along both terraces to get water to the root zone on a slope without surface runoff. The containers at the upper terrace are part of our containers and window boxes work. For more projects in the neighbourhood, see our Charlestown work, or browse the full portfolio.

Start a project like this one

If your Charlestown property has a grade change, a narrow footprint, or a similar rear garden to work with, call (617) 720-2266 or request a consultation. We’ll walk the site, talk through what the grade and the salt air will and won’t support, and follow up with a written proposal.