Landscaping Update: The Grove

While there's plenty more I'll hope to accomplish in "The Grove," I'm glad to have gotten this much of a start on it. This is the portion of yard that the driveway comes up beside and then wraps around to form the parking area...looking at the front of the house, it's over to the left. Here's a shot of how it all looked in August 2003, just before I bought the house:

There remain three cherry trees (the front left one shown above died soon after I bought the house, and I dug it up) and the Bradford pear in the center.

Here are a couple of shots of this area before I started work this spring on landscaping:

Here's how things are looking as of the beginning of June:

I have previously blogged about the beginning of this, where I relocated some of the monkey grass and created the planter to extend the retaining wall a bit farther. These pictures show that I've built up a planting area with more of my topsoil mix. You can also see, in the back corner of this area, a spread of hostas, which were a terrific recommendation from my friend Donna Whitley-Smith. I've planted impatiens and petunias and put a selection of small, colorful annuals in the planter.

Since I'm not operating according to any plan or wisdom of my own, I don't yet know what I'll end up doing to all this next. I suspect I'll bring the planting bed out a bit more, but we'll see.