Transformations: Front Yard

Transformations: Front Yard
Front Yard | Back Yard| Bali | Drycreek Valley | Woods behind the Back Fence

Front Yard Index
Driveway | Front Horseshoe | Front Bed | Front Bed Slope

Driveway View Slideshow
When I first bought the house, the driveway ran in a straight line from the mailbox all the way down to the fence and gate to the back yard. It was bordered by a steep, dense-packed red clay bank that nothing would grow on. I wanted to convert the useless red clay bank area to a parking spot where my son could park his car. Using heavy equipment, Harvey carved out the space and installed the driveway extension, which is hidden from about half of the available vantage points. It looked pretty good at installation, and helps to keep a spare car off center stage, both visually and in terms of traffic control.

The driveway extension is planted with a long border of prostrate rosemary, with occasional yucca plants interspersed. There's also a screen of evergreens between my house and the lot next door, one that includes a Japanese Cryptomeria, a few native red cedars, a Thread Branch Cypress, a Blue Ice Cypress, and a Yoshino Japanese Cedar. Closer to the street I installed a Dwarf Blue Palmetto and a Freedom Flowering pear.

When it approaches the street, The Driveway Extension meets Inverness Rd. at the mailbox area. For such a prominent place, the area around the mailbox was very late in developing. One reason is that the soil was deeply-baked compacted red clay that rain just bounced off of. The fact that I have hardly any pictures of that area speaks to how bad it looked. Eventually I got hold of a motherload of coffee grounds and humous, dug the whole thing up, and got plants on sale at the end of the season to fill it up. These are plants that can take those conditions and somehow not be eaten by deer: yucca, rosemary, gardenias (these last two also screening the utility boxes), and Chinese abelias. I originally had bridal wreath spirea aropund the mailbox, but it blocked vision of the road and so I moved them in 2019 down to the Inverness Parkway and replaced them with a bed of prostrate rosemary.

Front Horseshoe View Slideshow
The Front Horseshoe refers to the area encompassed by the U-shaped part of the driveway in the center of the front yard. When I moved in, it consisted of a large area of Bermuda grass and a bermed area planted sparsely with plants much beloved as food sources by deer, plus one tree that had been transplanted by the builder from the woods. The area was a drainage nightmare in that water rushed in off the street and cut away at the berm. The contractor was very pleased that he had included a drainage pipe to help drain the berm, which, as a berm, would have drained well on its own. The Front Horseshoe has two primary areas: the sloped area from the road to the berm, and the berm.

Slope from road to berm: This area was initially a bermuda lawn. Ultimately, I planted it with Glowing Embers Japanese Maples and Flying Dragon ornamental orange trees, with a ground level of Purple Muhly grasses, artemisia, oregano, a pomegranite tree, and a few other things that have come and gone over time. Although it's not visible, I also cut deep semicircles about a foot thick and four feet deep on the uphill side of each of these circles to help capture water running downhill from the street, and filled them with fallen limbs to absorb the water, which I eventually had to replace with gravel as it broke down. There's also a very deep drainage pit just in front of the berm, filled with old drainage pipes and anchored by about 10 large stones, in case any runoff water gets that far.

The area between the street and the berm now has four-season plantings: From about January through April, it is filled with a variety of daffodils with different bloom schedules. From about April through Fall, the area fills in with a patchwork of perennial groundcovers. In the Fall and early Winter, the purple muhlenburg grasses come in, dying back just as the daffodils begin to come up in December. Meanwhile, the Flying Dragons look cool year-round, with a sculptural thorny habit in winter, white flowers in the spring, green leaves in spring through fall, and in late fall small, inedible oranges. After a few years I began pruning the Flying Dragons so that they would compete less with the groundcovers and purple muhlies at the low levels, and so that they'd have a more distinctive form higher up. Not only are the oranges inedible, they reproduce plentifully, meaning that I have an annual chore of picking them up and burying them in boxes so they can't reproduce. This task includes a lot of ducking so that the thorny limbs don't rip my flesh to pieces.

Berm: I initially tried to plant the bermed area with a succession of deer-resistant plants--yarrow, petunia, agastache, salvia, etc.--that the deer ate with gusto when they weren't getting washed out by torrents of rainwater. I then decided that I needed to raise the berm and extend it farther out into the lawn area, a project that involved a whole lot of cardboard boxes, bags of topsoil from a big box store along with the pallets they were delivered on, and clay excavated from the drainage pits I dug for the Japanese maples and Flying Dragons in the sloped area.

Primarily for aesthetics, I also cut a path through the berm and put in a bench that I bought when Charmar went out of business, since replaced when it began to rot with a sturdier bench. Harvey Chandler of First Imprssions installed a nice stone patio for the bench, and I put a small nandina next to it for punctuation. I planted the berm with threadleaf coreopsis and allium (with which I've had mixed success) on one side of the path, and with golden ornamental oregano on the other. To keep mulch from washing off into the driveway, I bordered the berm with fieldstones that turned up when I was digging holes elsewhere, and lemon thyme as a groundcover/ground stabilizer. Shrubs along the berm border include a set of roundleaf osmanthus, nandinas, a William Penn Barberry, and a dwarf zebra grass.

Front Bed View Slideshow
When I first moved in, the front beds were occupied primarily by plants that have now been moved elsewhere. These included loropetalums, which all want to be 30 feet tall and so were moved to provide a border along the lower end of the back yard; spirea, which are on "deer resistant" plant lists that the deer weren't reading, and so were moved into a large spirea bed now known as the Dinosaur Terrace, because it's thin at one end, much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the far end; and a pair of crape myrtles that I felt were too close to the house and sidewalk and would thus eventually conflict with the roof and litter the front walk, and so were moved to different locations in the front. My challenge then concerned what to grow in these beds.

Deer were eating things that I was planting in the front, not just the spirea but yarrow, bee balm, and other plants on most "deer resistant" lists. I began to fill the area with iris, thyme, and evergreen shrubs such as cherry laurel and dwarf Alberta spruce. By early 2009, the design had begun to take shape and included a centerpiece of a dwarf saucer magnolia that was supposed to be 15 feet tall but is now over 30 feet tall and growing. It is surrounded by dwarf varieties of cryptomeria, camellia, and arborvitae. The irises were moved to the Office View Terrace, and ultimately to the Drycreek Terminus garden, where they remain, and have been divided to fill many more additional spaces in Bali.

Ultimately, this design stayed intact with only a couple of changes. I interspersed color guard yucca amidst the evergreens for color, added a vinca minor evergreen groundcover. I added a set of white and red azaleas at the foot of the magnolia, and pruned the magnolia up a ways to give them better visibility and growth potential. Meanwhile, the area around the front entrance stabilized with a Tamukeyama Japanese Maple and, in the corner, a 'Star Above Star' sasanqua Camellia to train up the entryway eventually. A third green-leaved Japanese maple of unknown name was added for a pair of Japanese maples in this bed.

Front Slope Bed View Slideshow
The front slope bed is the bed to the right of the main sidewalk to the front door as you face the house, extending down to the Office View Terrace. Initially it was planted with loropetalums that wanted to grow to the roof line, so the first order of business was to take them out and put them in what's now called the Spinner Park and Lower Pergola Terrace lower border. I then prepared a bed for lower-growing shrubs. The bed preparation involved taking a pick ax and busting up the awful compacted red clay and amending it with a manure and humous mix, then covering it with a thick layer of wood chips from an extensive takedown of dead pines and live sweetgums from the woods.

The new bed consisted of both dwarf and Chuck Hayes gardenias, a Dwarf Flowering Cherry, Edward Goucher Abelias, and Crimson Pygmy Barberry, anchored at the bottom by a trio of carissa hollies. The section between the drycreek and the stone steps is planted primarily with dwarf crape myrtles, with lamb's ear bordering the staircase. In 2012 the whole area had to be torn up to get to the bottom of a persistent leak that kept flooding the basement. The construction crew then put all the clay back, restoring it to its original dense and compacted state. Nonetheless I reinstalled the plants, more or less successfully, after they were uprooted to accommodate the construction, and undertook the process of re-conditioning the soil.