Adventures in Landscaping

If you read my last post most of our Mother's Day was spent working in the yard. It started with Adam mowing and me trimming our overgrown shrubs. I've never liked the shrubs in front of our house and knew that the long list of to-do's including removing them.

This picture doesn't quite show the monstrosities that are the current boxwood's but trust me, they are huge and don't offer much dimension or color variation. BORING! This is also a winter picture from our house hunting so the Crape Myrtles in the front bed wern't blocking the view.

After I trimmed all the bushes the crazy pregnant woman in me throught I'll just dig up these two huge bushes right by the front steps. I had somewhat of a mental plan but overall just figured once they were out Adam couldn't keep trying me convince me to wait until next year. Luckily for him my inability to bend over easily provided him lots of good exercise dragging all the trimmings and removed bushes to the street. :-)

We made a quick trip to Pike's and bought a dwarf Gardenia. I really love them because they are like miniture Magnolia's and I LOVE Magnolia's.

The entire next week every free minute I had was spent researching shrubery and mapping out a plan for the rest of the front beds. If I knew how I'd post my excel sheet to show you the color coded plan to scale. Three trips to Pike's later we had everything we needed to replace the boxwoods on the left-hand side. One of them had half died and was looking pretty strange and we wern't physically prepared to tackle both side so left was up first!

Poor Adam had to dig, and dig, and dig to get this monster out.

This bed is HUGE (8 feet deep actually) and only had the two boxwoods and holly before...

And now after with our Georgia Petite Indian Howthorns, Cream De Mint, and Cora Bells (back to front.) We kept the existing holly.

Of course, everything has some growing to do but we are so thrilled with how much visual interest it ads, how they aren't blocking the windows or hiding large animals, and just with ourselves for all the hard work. Here's hoping the deer don't eat it all.

The Gardenia I planted on the other side is blooming beautifully!! We are putting up our shovels until the fall or next spring but I see Camellia's for our future of the right-hand side of the house. :-)

P.S. We ran out of mulch so the Gardeina area still needs another bag or two.