Planting in gravel ?!

blast06

Hi,
I am clearing a site at the moment for construction of a new house. I have a choice wrt to my back garden .....
- have a 60cm wall at the edge of the driveway running along the back of the house with a sloped section of bedding from the top of that wall up to the level of the back garden with the garden at 150cm above the level of the driveway at the back of the house.
- 2nd option is to clear the entire back garden reducing its height down to the same level as the back driveway. However, in this scenario i would have a gravel 'cliff' face at the back of the back garden almost 2.5 metres high.

So my question for the 2nd option is how i could protect the cliff face from collapse (some sort of mesh wire?!) with a finished slope of say 70 degrees rather than 90. And secondly, is there any suitable shrub i could plant that will cover the area, will grow in gravel and further protect the bank from collapse (i.e.: its root system would be deep and would compact the gravel somehow).

I need this to be bullet-proof solution cos will have kids running around the back garden and obviously don't even want to have .1% worry in my mind that the bank could collapse on them.
Building a wall is not a pretty option cos it would need to be almost 45m and would be ugly.

Any help greatly appreciated.
Thanks.

looksee

This sounds like a job for a structural engineer, but my totally amateur answer would be - don't do it. A two and a half metre, 70 degree slope is asking for trouble. Mesh would not hold it in place, you would need a pretty solid system of 'terraced' supports in the bank. You also need to consider if there is going to be any water run off from above.

Other than a wall the only thing I can think of is gabions, though I imagine that would be as expensive as a wall.

ponddigger

any photos of the project, jack