Steps and stairs in gardens

Stuck with stodgy, stale stairs? There’s many ways to integrate them into your garden – or make them a stand-out centerpiece – like in the lead photo.

My favoritest stairs of all time. The back of each step has a planted channel where the owners grow strawberries. Found in Arlan & Dom’s Norwood Avenue garden in Buffalo.

If you’re building them from scratch, that’s one design challenge. If you have established steps or stairs – doctoring them up with paint and art is the way to go.

Buffalo is pretty flat, not many levels to gardens around here – a step here and a step there.We do have front porches though – and with all the grassless front yard gardens around here, stairs are a design consideration when it comes to the gardens.

My own front steps are boring concrete. When I win the lottery, I’ll be building a new porch. I’m pretty sure the concrete, wrought iron railing, and fake brick panels are not original to the 1897 house.

Here are some cool steps and stairs I’ve collected over the years…

 

These risers were once wrought iron uprights holding up a porch roof. From a Buffalo garden.

Deep red stairs pull you in and provide a focal point.

Portland’s Japanese Garden.

Flowers are only a part of what makes this front yard garden colorful.

The entryway “squeezes” you in a bit, then releases with a small bit od grass lawn a few steps in.

Chelsea Flower Show show garden.

Gardening’s most famous stairs? The Quarry Garden at Butchart Gardens, Victoria, British Columbia.

Sliding libray ladder along a Buffalo gardener’s roof. They ran out of ground to plant on!

Butchart Gardens’ Japanese Gardens.

Change in eleveations and materials helps create garden rooms.

Anything’s a planter. Any planter gussies up stairs.

Scottish Csatle stairs at the Falklnd Palace.

Smug Creek Gardens in Hamburg NY. Stairs buit by hosta enthusiast Mike Shadrack.

Modern corten steel and pea gravel planted steps in Austin, TX.

Paint! Paint like your life depends on it! Like these steps in Buffalo’s Johnson Park neighborhood.

Branklyn Gardens in Perth, Scotland.

I’d never had otherwise considered blck, but they do look sharp! Fund in an Allentownn garden here in Buffalo.

The front view of teh stairs used in the lead photo. Found on Ketchum Place in Buffalo.

These stairs are also the “viewing platform” for the garden and have a mirrored ramp nearby for wheelbarrows.

Wright made the steps at Taliesen West a design feature of the landscape.

Stone and gravel at the Chelsea Flower Show, London.

Japanese Garden, Butchart Gardens, Victoria, BC

Natural stairs in Delaware PArk’s Japanese Garden in Buffalo.