Landscaping & Hardscaping in Kent, WA

Kent is really two cities stacked on each other. The work splits along the same line. The Green River valley floor sits at about 30 feet of elevation. Flat, warehouse-heavy, with older houses in pockets like Riverview and North Park. East Hill and West Hill climb three to five hundred feet above that. Our shop is on East Hill off 116th Avenue SE, so most of the city is a ten-minute drive from the door. When a drain outlet plugs up in November, we're usually the crew that can swing back out the same week.

The houses tell you what's in the ground before anyone digs. East Hill filled in through the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Quarter-acre plats, builder cuts a flat pad, pushes the spoils toward the back of the lot. Decades later that pushed fill is what you're standing on when you ask why the yard drops six feet to the fence. Panther Lake came into the city with the 2010 annexation. A lot of it still has unincorporated-era drainage. Roadside ditches, no tightlines, downspouts dumping straight onto the turf. Scenic Hill above downtown is older and tighter. Houses from the 1920s through the 1940s, on lots narrow enough that getting a mini excavator to the back yard is a real conversation.

Up on the hill we hit Alderwood till. Eighteen to thirty-six inches of workable soil, then a dense hardpan a shovel bounces off. Water doesn't go through it. It runs sideways across the top. That's why so many Kent back yards have one corner that stays soft from November through March. It's also why so many eighties rockeries are leaning out with nothing but native dirt behind them. Down on the valley floor you get the opposite problem. Alluvial silt loam over old river deposits, a winter water table within a few feet of the surface, and a fine silt that'll pump into soup under a plate compactor if you try to compact it wet.

That changes how we build. A patio on East Hill gets a standard compacted crushed base and a drain path cut through the hardpan to a real daylight point. The same patio in the valley gets separation fabric under a thicker base section, so silt can't migrate up into the rock. Finish grade gets an honest fall away from the house. Fence posts on the hill often want a rock auger. Fence posts on the flats, we're watching how high the water sits in February.

For planting we stick with things that take a Kent winter without sulking. Sword fern and salal under whichever Douglas firs survived the subdivision. Evergreen huckleberry along a north fence. Vine maple and hydrangea where there's some light. Kinnikinnick over a hot slope of exposed till. Irrigation on East Hill often ties into Soos Creek Water and Sewer District or King County Water District 111 instead of City of Kent water. Every system we put in gets a backflow assembly and a test.