Retaining wall, which variants?

Hello everyone,

of course, you can find many ideas for retaining walls on Pinterest, but most of them are not from a "typical" garden. Do you have retaining walls on your property, and if so, what do they look like for you?

I need a slope support about 1.5m high behind the garage and a retaining wall for the terrace that should be about 1m high...

I would say it depends on the garden design. For natural, cottage garden, etc., I would tend towards natural stone. Lawn, wire mesh, bamboo, so rather clean or Asian, towards concrete in any form. We have sandstone. It was already there. The large retaining walls are old stock.

L- stones and hollow blocks plastered. Hollow blocks also come with different surfaces, do not need to be plastered, and have the advantage that you can make them yourself, so they are quite inexpensive. Otherwise, I also like dry stone walls, but they are not really suitable for lateral pressure.

L- stones and hollow concrete blocks plastered

Can you possibly post photos online? Those are actually my two favorites as well, although the L-stones are too expensive for me.

I can currently only photograph hollow blocks for you on one pallet. We will only start with the first retaining walls at our place in the last week of May. I am somewhat concerned that the plaster will not adhere permanently to the hollow blocks. You often see with older walls that the plaster crumbles. However, our mason said that this does not happen with proper treatment. We will see. But of course, do not forget drainage for the whole thing.

because I am currently dealing with various concrete materials, here is another idea: A concrete wall that is ground down after casting. This results in a rather attractive surface - depending on the stones used in the concrete, with different "coloring". And, speaking of coloring: concrete can also be tinted. I always find surface treatments like painting annoying because they always peel off after years and look correspondingly rotten, but if the material is tinted all the way through.... Grinding, however, is "not without challenges". You need good machines and craftsmanship for it, I would say .... With a concrete wall, you can be relatively sure that it will hold - it’s not expensive and can be shaped in many ways ... curves, arches, hollow, concave, depending on the skill of the formwork builder