Landscaping the Front Garden Bed

Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane and check out how the front of the house used to look when we bought it:

And how it is now:

It was a little bit overgrown, huh?

Walking up to the front door you used to brush aside the bushes and every morning would run into spider webs on your way to work.

We knew pretty quickly that those overgrown bushes in the front garden bed would have to go, so David dug them up within the first year we were here. So here’s the “before”…

Here’s the “during,” aka when we had torn out the bushes but unexpectedly allowed poison ivy to take over the garden bed… I remember being nervous taking Evie home from the hospital that day, watching my step to make sure I didn’t touch any of the vines.

And, after paying gardeners TWO times to come pull out all of the poison ivy by its roots over a span of six months (I stubbornly refuse to use RoundUp in our yard), and after David tilled it twice…

We finally did some proper landscaping!!! (And by we, I obviously mean David, haha. I was COVERED in poison ivy when I went into labor with Evie after digging around in this garden bed and swore to myself and multiple family members I would never dig in that bed again. Apparently poison ivy oils can live in soil after the actual roots have been removed… fun fact.)

We bought some expensive boxwoods (those little bushes you see in the picture beneath were pricey!), a dogwood, some less expensive boxwoods (you’ll see how tiny they are!), and some knock-out roses.

This was not our plan; we hired a landscape architect to come give us an idea of how to landscape the garden beds around the house. I told her my love of boxwoods and working with the already-existing boxwoods, she developed a simple yet classic plan we can repeat all around the house: two big boxwoods on the sides, little boxwoods in between, white roses in front of them.

Evie and I supervised, of course.

The landscape architect actually gave us a bigger plan involving peonies and ornamental grasses, but we decided we’d start with the basics and add to it eventually. Below you can see the size difference between the big and little boxwoods.

Drumroll– here is the “after!”

The [easyazon_link identifier=”B00QVZ8LS6″ locale=”US” tag=”farmhouse020-20″]mums[/easyazon_link] are seasonal of course but I love how they brighten up the front stoop.

To add some color to the rest of the garden bed since we’re not doing the peonies or grasses this year, we got some pansies on a good discount and planted them pretty quickly.

But even when the pansies aren’t particularly visible, I love the uncluttered look of a simple garden bed.