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

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

Oh, very very nice - beautiful stone work. Are those premade-precut or is one of you a mason? Also, is that stamped concrete or tiles? Either way the effect is very nice. The whole thing is a very nice design. I can't quite see what the plants are you put in - perennials?

[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]

Haha, all of it is concrete fake-stone from Home Depot! It is really cool putting the terraces together. Most of the work goes into preparing the dirt underneath so that it is level, and then pouring a layer of fine sand for the stones to rest in. Then it's just stack-em. Although cutting the stones is quite difficult - Britt bought a special saw blade but it was still a real pain. And they are so heavy! Talk about a workout.

Since saramwrap just asked about the plants, too, I'll edit in that information. They are all perennials, yeah.

[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.

[painless-j.livejournal.com]

Oh, looks really nice!

I like the helping cat best :)

[gaycrow.livejournal.com]

What a lot of hard work! It looks wonderful, though, so it was obviously well worth it.

I love plumbago, and it will be a pretty hedge when it grows.

Cats just can't help themselves, can they, they have to supervise everything!

[hedda62.livejournal.com]

Sweet woodruff has gone absolutely crazy on the shady side of my house (in acid soil).

Very impressive stone work!

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

It is in the nature of cats to be "helpful" all the time!

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much! The plumbago is right next to the alley so if it thickens up it will make a nice separator, I think.

We still have the backyard to do, sigh.

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's nice to know! I was trying to select plants for the shadiness and for our low-water conditions here. We are technically desert; I water occasionally, but I'm not very consistent about it, and in any event we feel morally obliged to not plant things that require a lot of water.

And you, too, can do impressive stonework with these great fake-stone concrete bricks from Home Depot! Plus, you get an upper-body workout like you wouldn't believe.

[libitina]

I love the raised beds and walkway - very lovely.

I love Home Depot.

[melusina]

Very cool - I really like your raised beds. . .

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much!

We actually only got a Home Depot in Durango a few years ago, but the timing was good for us because we bought the place in March and the Home Depot opened that summer.

[ilanarama.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I love the effect of the different heights. We have a tiny backyard to landscape next summer - it's about the same size as this, maybe a little bigger - and I think we'll do something similar.

[revbiscuit.livejournal.com]

It looks lovely, and yay for the bonus cat! We live in the middle of town and don't have a garden. Our next door neighbour, aided and abetted by some of his more constructionally talented friends, has just finished re-building ours, his and the house on his other side's back and side walls. It all looks great, and I cannot wait till next summer, when we will be able to 're-assemble' our back yard. I had it all sorted out with gravel, wooden decking tiles and lots of nice potted plants and small shrubs. I had to remove nearly all of them, and the gravel, when we had the house renovations done last winter, and have waited for ages to get the back walls done.

The only thing about the gravel, though, was that Peter reckoned I'd turned our back yard into the neighbourhood's poshest cat litter tray. Every week I had to go round and clean up! On a positive note, I am told either bigger pebbles or slate chippings discourage feline toilet activities, so I might try something like that next time.

And I can't wait to get my little reading oasis back.