front yard landscaping

[ilanarama]

I finally got our front yard landscaping photos onto the computer. For those of you following along at home, we live in town on a teeny city lot. Our front yard is divided by a walkway from the street to our door, and originally there was a lawn on both sides. The lawn on the west side (our house faces south) is fairly sunny and open, and it's reasonably lush, but on the (much smaller) east side the lot is heavily shaded year round by a big blue spruce by the street and a juniper next to the house that acidifies the soil, so the grass has always been pretty pathetic. This fall we dug up the entire east side of the yard and rebuilt it with a patio and fake-stone planter terraces.

This is what it looked like in an early stage of the landscaping:



This is what it looks like now:



In-progress pictures, with bonus cat in most of them, are here on my flickr page.

ETA: The lighter green groundcover is Aegopodium ("snow-on-the-mountain") and the darker green that is near the juniper is Sweet Woodruff, which supposedly likes the acid soil. The upper terrace has Plumbago and the lower two varieties of Coral Bells (one with purple foliage, one with green) and the quarter-circle planters have Cranesbill Geranium surrounded by small Butterflybush. Hopefully next spring everything will have spread and filled in!

Comments

[saramwrap.livejournal.com]

Looks awesome! I am not hugely into landscaping, but projects like this can make such a huge difference in appearance and enjoyment of the yard. Our little work on making our yard nicer has been thoroughly worthwhile.

What sorts of plants did you put into ground?

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Thank you! This was a lot of work (agony of design, many trips to Home Depot, and toting all the heavy fake-rock) but it does look so much better than scraggly grass.

I have edited the post with the plants we put in! They were all selected for part-shade and my lackadaisical care.