Landscape design and build in Milwaukie.

Volcanic in places, alluvial in others

The Boring Lava buttes around Milwaukie give some of the better-draining soil in the metro — dark, friable, and forgiving of both a wet winter and a dry August.

Down near Johnson and Kellogg Creeks the ground is alluvial: fine material dropped by water, which means it drains inconsistently and can be very soft. Two houses on the same street can need entirely different approaches, which is unusual and worth knowing before you assume your neighbour's solution applies.

Johnson Creek genuinely floods

Not as a technicality. It comes out of its banks, it does so most winters somewhere along its length, and the mapped floodplain is a real constraint on what is sensible to build. We check the map before we design anything at ground level near it, and we would not put a sunken seating area inside it whatever the drawings looked like.

Deer

Not a factor in most of Milwaukie.

The lots

Smaller and older than the county average — five to seven thousand square feet, bungalows and mid-century houses, mature street trees, and frequently a garage that eats a third of the back garden. The design problem here is usually room rather than soil.