Landscaping & Hardscaping in Ballard, Seattle

There are two Ballards under the pavement. North and west of about 65th, through Loyal Heights, Whittier Heights, Sunset Hill and out toward Crown Hill, you're on upland glacial till. Same hardpan we hit all over this side of the Sound. South and east it changes. Along Salmon Bay, the Ship Canal and the old industrial strip toward the Locks, a lot of the ground is fill, dumped over tideland and marsh a century ago. Seattle maps that lower corridor as liquefaction-prone. You feel the difference at the shovel. You hear about it again at the permit counter. And you can't tell which one you're standing on from the street.

Ballard was its own city until 1907 and the houses still say so. Ballard boxes and Craftsman bungalows from 1900 to 1930, sitting on narrow platted lots of three to five thousand square feet. Behind them, a full alley grid. That grid is the best thing about working in this neighborhood. Then two waves of change. Through the 2010s townhouses and rowhouses replaced single houses along the arterials, leaving back yards of four hundred square feet floored in compacted construction subgrade. In 2019 Seattle loosened its accessory dwelling rules, and backyard cottages went up across Ballard faster than anywhere else in the city. That changed what a Ballard back yard even is. So a lot of our work here is making sense of what's left. A narrow side run. A small paved court between the house and the DADU. A fence so two households aren't looking straight at each other.

Up on the upland the dig is familiar. Alderwood soil over till, hardpan around two feet, water sitting on top of it from November through March. Cobbles in the way. Down near the flats it's a different job. The water table is close, and a two-foot hole can fill with water on its own with no rain that week. The fill is whatever the mill and shipyard era left behind: wood debris, slag, brick, old timber cribbing, sometimes a length of buried rail. Base sections down there need geotextile separation, and bearing needs more thought than a textbook detail gives it. Old clay tile drains run through a lot of these yards. The people who put them in understood this rain perfectly well. Cut one by accident and you won't know about it until the next winter shows up as a wet lawn.

Alley access is why a Ballard project can often be built with a machine when the same project on Capitol Hill can't. A mini excavator will usually reach the back yard through the alley. That one fact takes real money off a patio or a wall, because the material and the spoil aren't moving by wheelbarrow. It isn't automatic though. Some alleys are narrow. Several are unpaved and turn to mush in February. Bins and parked cars block them. A newly built cottage may have eaten the turning room that used to be there. So we walk the alley before we quote, not after. Out at Sunset Hill and above Shilshole the wind comes off Puget Sound with salt in it, and gardens on those blocks need a tougher plant list than the sheltered streets around Adams and West Woodland.

What people ask for here is usable outdoor space in a small footprint, done right. A tight paver court with a gas fire bowl. Horizontal cedar fencing, which this neighborhood likes more than any other place we work. A raised bed that screens the alley without shrinking the yard. Sod on a two-hundred-square-foot lawn that actually roots, because we fixed the subgrade instead of covering it up. Planting swings between two extremes. Older lots keep a bigleaf maple throwing deep shade. The treeless townhouse parcels have no canopy at all. Sword fern, salal, carex and red twig dogwood handle the wet shade. Hebe, lavender, kinnikinnick and dwarf conifers take the wind and sun. Vine maple or a Japanese maple is usually the one specimen a yard this size can carry. Irrigation is drip and inline emitter tubing behind a tested backflow assembly, sized for beds you measure in feet.