Brown
Design + Construction

This project replaced the tired, overgrown beds around the home with a clean, low-maintenance landscape that wraps the house front, side and back. Before the work, weeds and straggling shrubs filled the bed under the front windows, and overgrown shrubs and ivy crowded the air conditioner and the walls along the side.

The old growth was cleared out, and new beds were laid out in long, sweeping curves that follow the house from the front porch, around the corner and along the side to the back deck. Every bed was finished in river rock and edged in black for a crisp line between the beds and the yard.

Planting was layered through the beds for color and year-round structure: white panicle hydrangeas at the front corner, red shrub roses and an evergreen standard beneath the bay window, and a young red-leaved tree in the side bed, where it curves around a row of large, rounded evergreens. Natural boulders anchor the bed at the porch and along the side of the house.

At the back, the river rock bed curves around the foot of the deck, finished with a tree-form hydrangea and low evergreens, and continues along the house past the air conditioner, which now sits in a clean, open bed.

The work carried out to the fence lines as well. A narrow river rock bed planted with ornamental grasses and shrubs runs along the side fence, and a row of columnar evergreens set in river rock now lines the back fence, where overgrowth had grown up along it before.