• Sloped yardCountry Yard image by mitrovili from Fotolia.com
  
  Living on top of a mountain makes you feel like you are on top of the world until you look down and have to figure out what you are going to do with your bare, sloped yard. Landscaping a sloped yard can be very challenging, but not impossible. Several clever ideas can help you beautifully landscape your sloped yard.
  
  

Retaining Walls

• Retaining walls work well for sloped yards and actually can help make your sloped yard look somewhat level. Create several tiered retaining walls and incorporate flower beds into them for a structured, tailored look. Build retaining walls from a variety of materials, including landscaping logs, bricks and stone. Building a retaining wall is a very simple do-it-yourself project that almost any homeowner can do. Retaining walls also help with drainage issues in your yard.
  
  

Creek Bed or Stream

• Easily incorporate a creek bed or stream into a sloped yard. In a simple project for do-it-yourselfers, use a shovel, some landscaping fabric, rocks and water. For a solution to drainage issues in your yard, start a dry creek bed close to your home and design it to drain away from your home in a decorative way. But even if drainage is not an issue, create a stream that pours into a pond to form an eye-catching water feature for your yard.
  
  

Rock Garden

• A rock garden is a simple and inexpensive way to deal with a sloped yard. Maintain a rock garden easily because you do not have to worry about watering any plants. Purchase a mix of large and small boulders in various colors to give your garden a colorful look. Add a decorative rock border around the larger rocks or intermix the small and large rocks and use a simple, plastic landscape border to finish off the look. Fill in the empty spaces with gravel to make it even more low-maintenance so that you do not have to pull out weeds. If you love greenery, add a few low-maintenance plants, and you still have a rock garden that is easy to care for.