Landscape Makeover at Our New Home

Good morning, readers! What a crazy-busy past several weeks it's been while moving from our loft to our new home. I had several projects going simultaneously, a landscape overhaul one of the most significant, with an interim makeover until I can think through future plans. Below is the before photo of our home from the realtor's listing photo in early spring 2021.

While things looked tidy and trimmed at that time, the home was really buried beneath an over-achieving landscape plan that was sold to the former owner as part of their renovation in 2015. The plan design was much too large (and random) for the small lot. My mission was to change that drastically.  Here's how it looks right now, below.

What transpired to get to this point was a lot of purging. First, we had a huge pin oak removed. It was about 85 years old, and was hovering over our slate roof and at the intersection of two city electric, high voltage wires.

It took three days for a professional team of five to take it down - carefully - and grind the stump.  Here's s a look after the tree was gone, below. 

Another two amazing things these guys did (besides NOT hitting the roof or wires) was manage where the stump would fall, and they managed to not destroy the existing cypress tree I wanted to keep in the landscape. They had the city come out to scope the sewer clean-out line from house to street to ensure avoiding the old terra cotta sewer piping (because a tree that large can, in fact, break a deeply buried line with the weight of its fall). The tree was 18+feet in circumference! Here's the guy who did most of the roping off and directional chain sawing, below. This was taken at the end of day two, before the stump was ground.

The week following the tree removal was all about having the huge boxwoods at the front entry removed and transplanted to the corner. This was done by another contractor. My goal was to create a natural barrier fence of sorts. Of twelve in the original landscape, seven boxwoods were transplanted. Each mature boxwood weighed about 200 pounds! It took 3 guys to move each one and position it.

Before and after boxwoods removal/transplanting:

Here is a view of the front entry, before and after boxwood removal, below.

I planted pansies at the front entry and left the upright boxwoods flanking the stoop. Many other plants were purged, namely barberry, Rose of Sharon, and spindly azaleas. The one wild plant you see pictured above (behind two drift rose plants) is St. John's wort. It's deciduous, and will be cut to the ground in spring before new growth begins. The straw areas have grass seeded, and the mulched areas leave a blank canvas for later plans.

A few other before and after views of other sections of my landscape follow.

The south side juniper, drift roses and nandina remain after purging a Rose of Sharon and cypress (there's still a ROS on the neighbor's property just on the other side of the fence. She gave permission to trim hers, so next year I'll prune beyond what my contractors did on my side). I transplanted a few pass along irises behind the roses. I had given these to my daughter from my former home's landscape in 2019, and she had enough to pass some back. They were originally passed to me from my 75 yr old friend's grandmother!

Just beyond the gate on this south side, the spindly knockout roses were removed, along with the boxwoods and barberry. Three upright boxwoods, a boomerang lilac, and peonies remain, and a pencil holly was transplanted from one of a pair of containers to this area (just one random planting example). Containers flanking the garage doors now hold matched plantings of pansies.

The west side of the landscape was thick with plantings. I kept the Hinoki cypress tree, oakleaf hydrangeas flanking it, two dwarf nandina, a holly bush, a witch hazel and a bottle brush plant. 

Items purged on this west side were a holly tree and crepe myrtle, literally growing on the neighbor's property at the fence line. Also purged were a red twig dogwood, weigela, azalea, spirea, ivy, and a couple other random plantings. 

That, my friends, is what I've been working on in the past few weeks! During winter, I'll think about what else I want to plant next spring, but the purged interim look is definitely more appealing to us right now. 

That's all the dirt I've got on my interim landscape plan! Thanks for visiting.

Rita C. at Panoply

A special thanks to Rachelle of My Hubbard Home's Friday with Friends #50  and Suzanne of Pieced Pastimes' Saturday Sparks #50 for featuring this post!

Parties I Share With: Pieced Pastimes, Love Your Creativity, BNOTP, All About Home Common Ground, All About Home Follow the Yellow Brick Home, Apple Street Cottage, Grandma Ideas,  A Stroll Thru Life, My Wee Abode, Thistle Key Lane, Bluesky at Home, Zucchini Sisters, French Ethereal SYS, Happiness is Homemade, Traffic Jam Weekend, Katherine's Corner TFT, Grace at Home, My Thrift Store Addiction, Our Hopeful Home, Karin's Kottage, My Hubbard Home FWF, County Road 407 Farmhouse Friday