For almost every weekend since winter has past, we've been working hard to finish selecting plants for the enclosed concrete landscape beds along the front of our house. Before we begin, have a look at where we started with beige 80's mania. Lately, everything has started to fill in nicely, we are sitting back enjoying our new view(s) so it's time to share our progress. On the left side approaching our house we have two tiered beds, and along the front we have one really long bed that gets varying levels of sun and shade which has made our plant selection tricky.![]()
On the far left we have a full sun perennial garden and closer up the higher bed is half sun (angularly) and half shade. We've always done well with a couple of annuals, the rest are perennials. This bed is in almost full summer bloom and adds a nice splash of color against the front of the house.
A close up of the mixed color. Echinacea flowers in the rear add a natural screen wall to the far side of our house. Up front are some summer phlox, veronica candles, different echinacea, and balloon flowers. Behind the tall echinacea, we have our herb garden.
Over in front of the concrete porch we poured a few years ago and adjacent to the newer walkway slabs we poured last spring is our other full sun perennial garden. We've tried to mix a lot of color throughout the seasons to contrast against the gray color of the house. Next year, this bed should be a slow fireworks display of color.
On the other side of this bed is a totally different color array of flowers. The long planting bed is made up of three different sections predicated on the quantity of sun each area receives. We've tried to stick to only flowering perennial plants in this section.
Looking straight at the full sun bed, there's a mix of agastache, echinacea, geranium, salvia, liatris, & shasta daisies. We are planning to add allium bulbs to have some early spring blooms.
The middle section is full shade due to our thriving Magnolia tree. We've kept is simple here with impatients and some spiderwort clusters. Over time the spiderwort will take over a majority of this area hopefully. It's a finicky plant, only blooms once a day in the morning for a short period.
On the far side is our almost full shade garden. Last year we had planted 5 azaleas to anchor this bed. Unfortunately, due to an accident by our roofers we lost two of them. We moved the remaining plants spacing the 3 survivors evenly and added some columbine, astilbe, and irish moss along the back side. The astilbe and columbine are spring bloomers and looked great when they were in bloom.
Walking pack along the paver path to the front door we added phlox down the entire length of the bed, previously we had only done half the length. It now anchors the whole bed and is slowly growing over the edge of the wall. This also flowers in early spring before almost anything else. Behind the phlox is a row of shasta daisies.
From our front door looking straight on the walkway. We've prescribed to mostly geometric, linear arrangements, this bed is the anomaly, but it's a good thing. We scored the large planter shortly after moving in the house at a DWR warehouse sale and have it stuffed full of cascading flowers.
Trying to catch a little color in front of the dark gray. All this is the culmination of several years of work, we are glad to be at a point of completion. You'll have to forgive all the kid toys in the photos, this is the way we roll most of the time with two young kids you have to keep it real.
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