Jim and Donna's front yard

As I have mentioned before Donna and I are working, slowly, on redoing our front yard. When we moved in the front was a sea of junipers and you could hardly see the house. As usual, I forgot to get before pictures, but I did get this one.

and this one

You can see what I meant by a sea of junipers. The area is mounded and looks like a peninsula in front of the house. Donna and decided to see if we could get some use out of the area and so we looked into developing a front courtyard.

Here is a picture of the mound from the back

You can see the area we are cutting out from the back to create a patio. there will be a Cal Stone retainer block wall to create some structure and hold the soil back. The existing exposed aggregate walk way is coming out and the patio and walk way will be a Cal Stone Quarry Stone paver patio.

More....

As you can see here we are putting a short fence on the top of the mound to increase the privacy. It is short because on top of the mound a full 5 ft or 6 ft fence would be overpowering.

Because of the shape of the front yard we are installing a second entrance that goes over the mound with an arbor over the entry.

It has a wisteria planted that I intend to keep under control and only let it be on the arbor. (As an aside, when you use wisteria be sure you don't let it wrap trunks around any posts or lumber. If you do wisteria is capable of twisting and destroying timber up to a 4x6 post.)

You can see the start of the walkway over the mound. eventually there will be a gate and steps down to the front patio.

We recently put in some rocks to create some structure in the very front. The area is to provide additional seasonal color using annuals and perennials to accent the rocks.

The lowest area in front of the rocks is planted with Iceland Poppies that are just starting to set buds. Behind them we planted "Grande snaps" ( in spite of the name they are semi dwarf to about 18".

In addition we have pansies, Sugar Plum Cranesbill, Bidens, and candytuft. By the fence there is a combination of foxy foxglove and delphnium.

Out of the corner of your eye you might be able to see some of the other things planted so far. They include landscape roses, Alexandrina Oriental Magnolia Ballerina climbing rose, Don Egolf dwarf redbud, Ruth's Red Japanese Maple (A new variety, as a trial to see how it does in the sun here.), Seiryu Japanese Maple, Chinese Dogwood, Arbutus Marina and Dark Shadows leptospermum.