McDowell Landscapes has constructed many boulder walls throughout the Twin cities. Every wall is unique in and custom built for our clients wants and needs.

Our most common walls are built using glacial boulders, but there are many boulders available to choose from when building a wall such as superior trap rock (similar to limestone rock but have their own unique color and texture), mesabi red, as well as many varieties of limestone. Boulders come in all sorts of shapes (round, rectangular, or angular) and sizes (small 12-18”, all the way to 48”+).

Building a retaining wall with boulders is often no different from a segmented retaining wall. Proper drainage behind the wall is still needed, such as grading behind the wall, installing drain tile, and drain rock, fabric is needed to retain soil and drain rock from seeping through the crevices in the walls and a engineered plan is still needed for both if exceeding 4 feet in height.

McDowell Landscapes has the necessary equipment needed to build large boulder walls, large track skid steers are needed to move boulders around the site and in some cases can be used to construct walls. However a large excavator with a grapple or a thumb is the most effective way to properly place each boulder.

To the untrained eye placing boulders may look easy and it may even seem unnecessary to have such large equipment on a landscaping job, but for reference a 2-foot diameter limestone boulder is roughly 650 lbs, a 3-foot diameter boulder is approximately 2200 lbs and a 4-foot diameter boulder can easy weight over 3500 lbs. So having the proper equipment for the job is key.