Brick drain/retaining wall

Sometimes you can't start one project without doing another project first...

We've had an issue with drainage behind the garage ever since we had the gutters installed. There is no place for the water to go. After having tried a couple years of a ditch with plastic and pebbles on top (into which washed a lot of soil from the neighboring garden) I've decided to lay a brick path.

What I really wanted to do was sand and paint the back side of the garage, but as you can see in the pics we have a mud splashing issue and until that is resolved I couldn't see the point of painting. I'll use the bricks to make a retaining wall kind of thing to keep the soil back too.