A Little Landscaping

With the free time we’ve had lately with the earliest end to baseball I can recall, I’ve had opportunity to get a few little things done around the house to make things look a little better.

In front I redid the flower beds around the red oaks which we’d let fall into major disrepair over the last few years.  I wanted shasta daisies to go with the yellow flowers between them, but coudn’t find them so went with black eye daisies.  These are not as big and I’m not sure I’m going to like them, but the yellow flowers between look good.

Lisa found some ground cover she liked, so she planted those in the bed we’d killed off last year.  Hopefully this ground cover (Astenia) will fill in solidly and set of the lantana we’ve had there for the last few years.  That lantana is beautiful stuff and very hardy.

On the side I have added more boxwood so that will fill in quicker and I’m going to keep it trimmed shorter than originally planned.  I dug up all the roses we had along the walk.  They were 15 years old, very woody and just didn’t look healthy any more.  In their place I put a mixture of red yucca and mexican heather.  The heather took a while to settle in but I think it’s to make.  I completely rebuilt that bed, edging it with red scalloped edgers, filling it with red cypress mulch and putting in solar accent lighting.  I really like the way this looks.

The red scalloped edging looked so good on the bed that I bought the same kind of curved edging to make a new tree ring for the red oak there.  I also redid the half whiskey barrel there and set in four english ivy which I want to cover and spill out over the edges of the barrel.  I put some perriwinkle in the window box outside the laundry room window.  They are a little oversized for that box so I hope they survive.

The tree ring with the red scalloped edging looks so good I’m going to redo the tree rings in the front where the golden rain trees are soon.  The golden rain trees are blossoming better than ever before this year, which is surprising given that they put out leaves twice and had them killed off by late frost each time.  Third time’s a charm I guess.  I’m also letting the buffalo grass grow up to 4″ this year.  That’s supposed to be heathier for the buffalo grass and will help it thrive with the once every two weeks watering plan I started last year.  It’s looking good this year, and was before we got any rain, so I think that’s going to work – but I have a significant amount of undesirable grass and crabgrass I need to get killed off.

That’s it for the landscaping update!  I was just so happy with how some of it looked when I finished Saturday that I thought I’d snap a few shots of it.  Plus I had not taken any pictures of the house since it was built.  This place has changed a lot!