The One With The Smorgasbord Yard

In April of this year we shared photos of our back yard redesign and the craziness that is our front yard. Then a few weeks ago my parents came down to visit and provide some much needed help with the cleaning and organizing of our front yard.

The whole weekend was spent pruning, digging, planting and dropping some major moolah at Armstrong Nursery and Home Depot. Yet after taking some recent photos and comparing them with the ones I took in April, it really doesn't look like we did that much.

So in an effort to prove that we actually did some work, I'll describe what was done in the 'After' photos in case you miss the subtle differences. Here goes nothing...

Although Brad pointed out that the 'Before' picture looks more green and colorful, it also looks a little more wild- which was what we were trying to tame. In the 'After' photo you can actually see the stone pathway that wraps it way through the front yard. I actually like this stone detail because it breaks up the large space, Brad, on the other hand, doesn't get why there's a pathway that no one will ever use. You can also see our 2 new gardenia trees in the background that nicely break up the beige stucco of the house.

In this 'After' photo you can see we removed the dead bush that was on the right side of the 'Before' photo and added some new chocolate ajuga plants to line the very front of the yard.

The biggest change to the yard is this small strip of dirt on the left-hand side leading up to the front door. It used to have some spiky flax plants that kept growing into our walkway, so we replaced those with primroses, lily flax, azaleas and a gardenia bush. The 'After' photo also gives you a better shot of the gardenia tree we used to replace the pink bougainvillea plant that I swear was only pink for this one photo.

Unfortunately, I don't have a 'Before' shot to compare to this photo below. The reason why? That half dead looking bush was basically the size of us and threatening to take over our entire front porch. And since this particular bush is a major magnet for bees, we knew it needed to be scaled back in size. We also added some more primroses, lily flax and ajuga down in front.

That's all for our front yard. Not the most exciting adventure here at The Daily Carter, but we're a lot happier to drive up to a house/yard that we can tell is a little more clean and organized.