Landscaping & Hardscaping in West Seattle, Seattle

West Seattle is not really a neighborhood. It is a glacial upland peninsula about the size of a small city, hung off the rest of Seattle by one high bridge and one low one. It has three different edges. The Puget Sound side is a bluff, running from Alki around Beach Drive to Fauntleroy. The east side drops into the Duwamish valley through Pigeon Point, Riverview and Highland Park. The middle is a broad plateau sitting between two hundred and three hundred feet, from the Admiral District south through the Alaska Junction to Gatewood and Arbor Heights. We work all three of those differently. So pricing a project here starts with knowing which edge your lot is on.

The housing came in waves and you can read them right off the street. Admiral and the Junction filled with Craftsman bungalows and foursquares through the 1910s and 20s, on platted five-thousand-square-foot lots with alleys behind them. Highland Park, South Delridge and the blocks toward White Center took fast wartime housing for Boeing in the early 1940s. Small footprints on flatter ground. There was no landscaping budget then and not much has been added since. Beach Drive, Seaview and Gatewood picked up view ramblers and daylight basements through the 1950s and 60s. Since roughly 2015 the arterials have taken a heavy load of townhouse and rowhouse infill, California Avenue and Delridge Way in particular. On those, the back yard is whatever was left over after the building envelope.

What people ask for follows the terrain. On plateau lots they want a back yard they can actually use. A paver patio that stays flat, a fire table, cedar fencing, a lawn small enough to be honest about. On the sloped lots, and there are a lot of them, the ask is grade. Terraces, steps, a wall to hold the cut behind the garage. Our most common hardscape call on this peninsula is a failing timber wall. Pressure-treated 6x6 and railroad-tie walls went in through the 1970s and 80s, and they are at the end of their service life everywhere out here. They almost always fail leaning outward, with the soil already moving behind them. Replacing one is a drainage job at least as much as a block job. If somebody quotes it as just block, they have not looked behind the wall.

Here is what the shovel finds. Alderwood series soil over Vashon till: eighteen to thirty inches of gravelly sandy loam sitting on hardpan. Water will not pass through it. That is why so many West Seattle back yards are soup in February and concrete in August. It is also why every base section we build here drains to daylight. A dry well has nowhere to give. Cobbles and glacial erratics come up constantly. On the older streets we hit buried heating oil tanks, clinker brick and mixed demolition fill in the top three feet. Along Delridge the ground changes character, because Longfellow Creek runs that valley, partly piped and partly open. The subgrade near its course stays wet year round. Out on the bluff edge above Beach Drive the till gives way to loose Esperance sand. That will not hold a vertical cut for an afternoon.

Access here is easier than the north-end Seattle neighborhoods, but it is not free. A lot of the older blocks have alleys. That is how we get a mini excavator into a back yard instead of running wheelbarrows all week. Streets on the bluff are narrow, steep and often parked solid, and a handful of Beach Drive addresses have no legal place to set a dump trailer at all. Everybody on this peninsula learned what the detour routes cost during the bridge closure from 2020 to 2022. We still schedule material deliveries around the low bridge and the First Avenue South Bridge instead of assuming a clean run. For planting we stick with what tolerates a shaded, wind-exposed maritime lot. Sword fern, salal and evergreen huckleberry under mature Douglas fir. Vine maple and Japanese maple for structure. Hydrangea and rhododendron on the sheltered sides of the house. Kinnikinnick and lavender where the salt wind comes straight off the Sound at Alki. Irrigation runs on Seattle Public Utilities water behind a tested backflow assembly. We zone it so the baking south slope and the wet shade under the firs are never on the same clock.