There were the fiber-cement panels of the 1987 Ricola storage facility in Laufen, Switzerland, and the gabion walls, filled with stones, of the Dominus winery in the Napa Valley, completed a decade later.

These gabion walls will support the berms of soil along the approaches and won’t be visible to the wildlife, who will only see what appears to be a continuation of the hill, Rock said.

Gabion is one of those landscape words with a couple of accepted pronunciations.

Any way you say it, gabion structures are incredibly versatile additions to outdoor spaces.

While the concept can be traced as far back as ancient Egypt, when woven reed baskets were used to shore up the Nile’s banks, the word gabion spun off from gabbione, meaning “big cage” in Italian.