Landscaping

We are trying to plan out our landscape for next year and are really not coming up with a whole lot. What have you guys done around your house? Did you put anything in specifically for your critters? Any pictures? Any favorite websites?

Thanks!!

Gardenia bushes were always a favorite of mine..

I like this site for ideas: http://www.houzz.com/ just click landscape and you can search by specifics

I vote for awesome treehouse!!


sadly, I live in an apartment.. no yard lol so I'm barely any help.

What kind of soil do you have? How much maintenance do you want to do on it? Do you have to worry about dog/child safety?

You could pick some themes and roughly stick to them. Just for some ideas:

Native plant landscape
Japanese garden
Edible landscape
Color themes

All white gardens are called moon gardens. You only plant white flowers and foliage plants with silver/white on their leaves. They look pretty flippin incredible in the moonlight, I plan to make a garden corner like this some day.

Any color combo really, with other accents. Blue/pink, yellow/orange/reds with cobalt blue, purple/gold. etc

We live in a pretty dry area, and so chose all 'water wise' plants.

I wanted to actually, y'know, landscape my house, but my dad bought a bunch of the same thing and plunked them in without my input, so...

Thanks guys.

Fran,
someone here suggested Houzz once upon a time and I looked at it then, but forgot what it was called. Thanks for reminding me! I love the tree house. Here in NY you need a building permit for anything with a foundation/ footprint, so Ben was telling me about a co-worker that built a tree house for his kids to get around that rule. But Ben and I are not that handy.


Romy,
I am a no mess, no fuss type person so I'm definitely looking more towards native plants. The internet tells me that "Dutchess County soil textures are dominated by silty loam and loam (25 percent clay and 75 percent a mixture of sand and silt in roughly equal proportions)"

I really want to add some sort of low shrub between the house and the road with a break for the mailbox, but I'm not sure.

You could do a sidewalk lined with shrubs/flowers from your porch to one side of the mail box, according to the picture you posted.

I would also add some low/small-ish trees (think crepe myrtle type style/size) to your front lawn in various places.

I took these pictures early spring before all the flowers bloomed. Each year we add a little more to the yard

We added this fountain this year.


This is the front yard, we definately need to add more color next year.

My husband built this wall about 5 years ago. I love the face he added into the greens.

I'm going with low maintenance with some small hanging tree type things and these small pine tree type bushes my grandma has I like. I can not keep plants alive to save my life. Love ferns though but won't work everywhere.