I know I've been quiet here...sorry. Life takes over sometimes! :-) We're very busy w/baseball and softball and finishing up school. Today we're heading to a weekend tournament in Indiana. Besides going to Cooperstown this summer, this is the only out-of-town tourney we're going to as a family. I hope it will be fun.
Anyway, here are a couple of photos from some landscaping we had done a couple of weeks ago. We desperately needed something done w/the terrible landscaping job the builders had done (really, who plants pussy willow as an ornamental shrub???) and the price was right. It really makes the place look a lot nicer!
This is the corner where the pussy willow once was. We had it replaced with some variation of lilac. It's more tree-like, but I think it is some sort of dwarf. I can hardly wait for it to be in bloom and smell that heavenly fragrance!
The plants around the bottom are some sort of sage (purple flowers) and I think coreopsis (yellow flowers).
Along the front o the porch are dwarf lilacs, which we had at our old house and are fairly low maintenance. Planted in front of those shrubs are day lilies, which I think the landscaper said will be red blooms.
Here the landscaper moved the dwarf Japanese maple back and continued the line of the wall which aligned with the step up from the walkway. Previously the whole section along the walkway was mulched, but we had the landscaper plant grass seed instead. Once the grass has grown, there will be less issues when the kids play basketball. Hopefully the little tree won't suffer as much abuse, either!
One photo I didn't take was the little extra job they did on the other side of the house. We have a problem with basketballs rolling down the hill into the woods. To help stop the balls from going all the way into the woods, we had the landscaper transplant our evergreens to create a little "wall" effect (this was done with our neighbor's approval). So far, so good.