Planting the New Landscape – Front Landscape Round 2

Before we talk new landscaping let’s review a few other unsightly areas of our front yard – the disheveled front corner bed and the bradford pear tree.

Here is a before picture. Unfortunately I didn't take a picture from this corner in the spring before we removed the tree and corner landscape bed.

Since we wanted a yard with less maintenance we decide to remove the bland corner bed from our front yard and replace it with grass.

Here it is today looking much better. We will over seed this area in the fall to get rid of the few areas that are a little patchy.

The reason we had to remove the bradford pear tree was due to a safety and liability concern. It is hard to tell from pictures but the tree had three large branches attached at near 90 degree angles (two of which were directly over our neighbor’s driveway near where they park their car) According to the arborist we consulted branch splitting is a common problem with Bradford pear trees making them susceptible to splitting or collapsing during severe storms or from heavy snow and ice.

Now it is finally time to see our new plants that are giving our house some much needed curb appeal. Since our front yard is mostly full shade thanks to our nearly century old tree it narrowed our potential plant selections down.

We ended up settling on six boxwoods and four midnight rose coral bells.

The midnight rose coral bells have a dark purple foliage with bright pink spots.

Here is a look back at our front yard in the spring

And here it is now

I think our house is finally starting to have some curb appeal. The best part of our front yard update was it cost us nothing thanks to selling our pavers on craigslist!

A fun side note - one of our neighbors commented/made fun of us (well mostly me) for walking down to the sidewalk several times, standing with the my hands on my hips to look at the progress we were making.