In our country today we are using more and more hillside sites for our homes each year, carving out terraces from the slopes with bulldozers and leveling our living areas into terraces which step down from the house, from the street, and from terrace to terrace as we need more land for outdoor living. This comes from a practical need, but there is an aesthetic theory which can be applied, too, for the two are not incompatible. For instance, in the new trend in American gardens we see many more hillside plots left as Nature made them, with wild trees and shrubs kept and others planted to complement them, and with fewer hillside lawns to create problems of maintenance. It is only the living areas around the houses which have been leveled for terraces and living lawn areas. Paths thread downward through the natural parts of a hillside, with a few unobtrusive steps inserted here and there when the slope becomes too steep for a path to negotiate easily. Sometimes the paths are a series of very wide steps, a kind of ramp broken here and there by risers.

In more formal treatments, steps are used to climb up to terraces raised above the level of the house or the garden, or to descend to those placed below it. Little retaining walls are built to divide the garden into two levels, both charming the eye and giving the illusion of more space, because the division will lend a visual interest to the whole garden picture.

Steps, steps, and still more steps . . . that seems to be the order of the day in American garden design, and the choice of kinds of steps to use in your own garden has never been wider. Ramp steps for climbing long slopes gently, with the minimum effort; circular steps; free-form steps with flowing curves; wooden steps to wooden-decked terraces; water-washed stone steps laid to simulate a natural outcropping of rocks; brick-and-plank steps; cast concrete steps; concrete-and-plank or concrete-and-brick steps; cut-stone steps; steps made of old railroad ties . . . the list is practically endless. Every day more new and exciting ways to use building materials are found, ringing new changes on the classic combinations and making wonderful new combinations of materials to suit our changing styles of houses and gardens.