Landscape Design & Installation in Bothell, WA

On the hill you are designing level ground into a fall — terraces, steps, retaining, and a scheme that works across changes of height. Down on the valley floor there is no slope, so the design has to invent structure, and it has to work with soil that sits close to a high water table for much of the year. Planting palettes differ, what you can build differs, and the drainage strategy is close to opposite: interception above on the hill, outfall capacity on the floor. Applying one approach to the other is the usual reason a garden here disappoints.

For the planting and surfaces, rarely. For anything structural, yes. Bothell spans the King–Snohomish boundary, and the permitting authority, the height thresholds for retaining walls, and the applicable critical area regulations are set locally rather than regionally. A design containing a substantial wall, or work near a creek corridor, needs to know which set of rules governs the parcel. We establish that at the first visit rather than assuming from a neighbouring street.

Yes, with everything buried in the first stage. Drainage, irrigation sleeves under any future hard surface, and lighting conduit cost very little while the ground is open and a great deal once there is finished work above them. After that, structure, then surfaces, then planting and lighting. On a Bothell hillside lot the first stage is usually retaining and drainage, which produces bare usable ground rather than a garden — unsatisfying, and the only sequence where you pay for each element once.

Species that tolerate ground staying saturated for months rather than ones that merely survive a wet week. On the North Creek and Sammamish River floors the water table sits close to the surface, so anything needing sharp drainage will struggle regardless of how well it is planted, and raising beds only helps if the water underneath has somewhere to go. Designing with the conditions — wet-tolerant planting where the ground is wet, drainage where an area genuinely needs to be drier — produces a garden that establishes rather than one that is replanted every third year.