graff
Newly Registered
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu May 16, 2013 8:27 pm

New house, need help with front landscaping, quick!

Hi there everyone!

I am new to landscaping and gardening so I have no idea what to do with the front of the house we just bought. We live in Western PA, zone 5A. The front of our house gets morning sun. Some of my favorite plants/flowers are hydrangeas, lilacs, azaleas, but I also like greenery. In our backyard we have a ton of hostas that could be moved. Any and all ideas would be greatly appreciated! We are having a house warming party in June and I would really like to have the yard spruced up by then. :)
thanks in advance!
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rainbowgardener
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Posts: 25279
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 6:04 pm
Location: TN/GA 7b

Well, before I say anything else, I have to say June is not very far away! Depending on when in June, but mid June is a month from now! If you have plenty of money and can hire a landscaping team to come and install a ton of mature plants like they do on HGTV, you can have a beautiful yard in a weekend. (I always wonder though what those yards look like two months later - mature trees and stuff don't always transplant as well as younger materials and can be difficult to maintain.) For the rest of us DIY folk, landscaping is usually a slow project and won't look beautiful the first year or two, because you are planting young stuff that will look sparse at first until it fills in.

That said, I will give the same advice I give almost everyone that writes in about landscaping. For some reason it is traditional to do one skinny row of plants in a straight line as foundation plantings. It is boring and ugly (IMHO!). If you are going to have foundation plantings make a nice deep bed, give it a curved edge, plant things in groups, not lines, plant shorter stuff in front of taller stuff. And go big! What you have now is a line of very small plants all out of scale with the house behind them.

Image

https://img2-3.timeinc.net/toh/I/g/12/ya ... plants.jpg

(but note this is obviously plantings that have been there a long time... again, your yard will NOT look like that in June! :) )

in Google images, search on beautiful foundation plantings and find pictures that inspire you. Drive around your neighborhood and look at what is growing well.

Besides your foundation planting, maybe put an island bed in your lawn with a small tree (dogwoods are beautiful), a shrub like your hydrangea or azalea (lilacs like full sun) and some smaller plants.

I'm sure others will chime in with some plant suggestions, I don't have time right now.



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