Need Help with Soil Erosion

[FairyDust]

Here's a picture of our house so that you guys can see the problem spot.
[img]https://i55.photobucket.com/albums/g150/Antisocial2173/May28th2006.jpg[/img]

Along the front next to the road there's that line of river rock. Apparently before that was put in there was about a foot deep gutter there from the rains that wash down the road whenever it rains heavy. Before we moved in someone that owned it never did a thing to it, just collected rent and let it fall apart. So someone bought the house redid the house inside and out then resold it. We've been working on the yard since this spring (we moved in at the very end of august last year and had no time for the outside).

We're going to be putting in a white picket fence around the front yard and it'll be about 2ft away from where the river rock is at so that its not affected by the rain. The problem we're having is that we had a really heavy rain recently and a lot of the rock got washed away. Its not a foot deep again, but it will be eventually. I had originally wanted to plant a ground cover infront of the fence so it'd be low maintenance (and then maybe put flower boxes along the front of the fence for summertime, we don't know yet on that idea). Can I still put some sort of groundcover that will help keep everything from running down to the bottom of the road during heavy rain? We're not like on a hill or anything, but the road does slope down towards the mainr oad that intersects and for some reason the water just happens to get angled towards the front of our yard (the neighbor next to us thats higher doesn't have this problem it angles right past his place to hit the front of ours, thankfully our frontyard slopes up pretty high so it doesn't go past that river rock area).

I don't even know what I had planned to use yet for groundcover. Had hoped for something with flowers, but now I just really want something that'll keep the erosion away or reduce it and that will also go with a picket fence (I was originally going to try and find something country cottage garden looking). I'm also in Zone 6. Any ideas or suggestions (even if they aren't for ground cover)?

[opabinia51]

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