Front Yard: January to December 2007

When we first moved into our house I looked at the front yard of our neighbors across the street and told Em that was what I wanted for our front yard.  Amazingly, exactly that has happened since the aforementioned neighbor, Martin, agreed to spend the day shopping with us for rocks and plants and then laid everything out for us once we got it back home.  All I had to do was what he told me, which was great since Em and I don't know much about landscaping and plants.

When we moved in Steven hadn't yet built the deck, but the garden (by Martin) was essentially the same as in the picture above.  We are forever grateful to Martin for helping us to make our front yard beautiful like his.  Of course, he has better views of it than we do, so much so that he has started calling it his 'annex'.

This is a picture of what our front yard used to look like.  Long gone are the black metal fence, Juniper bush (or is a tree?, at any rate, it's behind the Willow) and Camellia tree (left of the Juniper).  According to the neighbors, our house used to have a nice white picket fence and the black metal fence was less than 1 year old.  After I removed the fence every single neighbor came by and commented on how ugly it was and how glad they were to see it gone.

Here is the yard the day before we put the plants in, in fact you can see them between the garage and path to the front door.  We didn't put them in on this day as we were waiting for two large rocks to be delivered the following morning, the larger of the two weighing in at over 1700 pounds.

Hooray for the annex!  We look forward to watching our low maintenance and drought tolerant yard grow in the years to come.  Martin's garden (and Steven's deck) are in the background along with the 1700 pound boulder.

A view of the front yard from the street.

The trellis and swing are the only part of the front yard that I did without input from Martin.  Near the front door, on the garage side of the house, we have a very old and gnarly Wisteria and I built the trellis just so it could grow on it.  The swing ($90 +$20 shipping at PorchSwings dot com) was an afterthought but fills the space nicely.  The lumber for the trellis was considerable more expensive.

The posts are pressure treated 4x4's wrapped in Redwood 2x6's giving 7x7 posts.  The beams spanning between the posts are Redwood 4x6's and the smaller beams on top are Redwood 4x4's.

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