8 Times A Vegetated Retaining Wall Transformed a Residential Landscape

Create a natural masterpiece for your own garden, taking inspiration from these 8 green fingered home owners!

A vegetated retaining wall system can be a stunning addition to your home’s landscaping, providing the function of a standard retaining wall while also giving the opportunity to create a beautiful natural feature for your garden. They are also a great option for erosion control on banks or in waterways such as a small pond or creek. With many different ways of incorporating a vegetated wall into your landscape, you can opt for humble and functional, or go all out and let your green wall become the main event.

Scroll on for some inspiration from 8 projects that used a FlexMSE Vegetated Wall system to transform their backyards!

1. Honeymoon Valley, Northland

The goal for this project was to stabilise the steep clay bank and prevent erosion, while providing a soft aesthetic that would complement the house design. Cue: vegetated wall! As the photos show, this would have been a tricky site to navigate with heavy machinery, another reason why FlexMSE was an obvious choice. As the vegetation is taking hold, the home is being rapidly transformed into a lush natural retreat.

2. Peka Peka

Where a more traditional retaining wall could look drab, this homeowner’s choice to engineer a vegetated wall system along the driveway helped create a lush green entrance for their coastal property. Salt-tolerant native ground cover species provided fast canopy closure ensuring long-term resilience.

3. Whangarei

This lush rural property with its steep sloping site proved a challenge, along with the homeowner’s vision for a wall design that would not be too conspicuous. Enter FlexMSE! With the new 26m long vegetated wall, this property has now gained an extra 40m2 of flat grassed area, and an aesthetically pleasing wall that will blend into the rural surroundings once the plants have taken over.

4. Ponsonby, Auckland

With the challenge of a section with a steep gradient, narrow driveway and time constrictions, a vegetated wall was the ideal choice to create a level terrace, transforming this backyard into a place of escape where the owners can unwind and spend time with friends and family.

5. Lake Karapiro

An intensive gully area near the Lake Karapiro Arm was experiencing large erosion issues. A vegetated wall system was used to recreate the area into an idyllic walkway down to the lakeshore. Crystal the homeowner was particularly impressed with how the area could be restored back to a natural environment while utilising a permanent structure that would prevent erosion occurring again in the future.

6. Wellington

This homeowner was having issues containing a bank that was overgrown with gorse and other weeds, above a concrete retaining wall. The gradient and limited access to this site posed a further obstacle so this customer was looking for a solution that was fast and easy to install in these conditions. A FlexMSE vegetated wall easily fits this brief and has been installed to create a bedding for flax and other natives to grow, naturalising the area quickly and effectively.

7. Diamond Harbour, Christchurch

Before, during and after… the owners of this Canterbury home revamped their property by replacing the rotting sleeper retaining walls with two curved FlexMSE walls. What a transformation! This project illustrates the design versatility of a vegetated wall and its ability to flex to the contours of the landscape. It also shows the wide variety of plants that can be used for this type of wall.

8. Akaroa, Canterbury

A vegetated wall was the perfect solution for this steep and tricky slope on Banks Peninsula, the bags easily moulding to the natural curves of the landscape. With no need for heavy machinery to install the wall, the installation was quick and simple and the results stunning.

View our installation guide here: