Hi,

I've been a long time reader of this forum and have gotten some great ideas and tips on some projects. Our front yard is in some desperate need of help. We are just outside of Philadelphia to the north, I believe in zone 6.

Here is the first picture of the front of our house. We just painted the porch floor. Here is how is originally looked (the bench is normally up on the porch).

{{gwi:5483}}

We have since removed the two bushes and prepped the lower part of the house to be repainted a similar blue color as it was before. Here is how it looks now ready for its remake

{{gwi:5484}}

{{gwi:5485}}

{{gwi:5486}}

As you can see, we have a tree in the middle and a huge tree to the left. I believe the previous owner had mulch around the tree all the way to the stone surrounding the trees. We like that on both of them, but the area around the big tree is almost 9-12' away from the trunk, which seems way too much area to have mulched.

With a little help from a family member, we drew up some ideas. Here is what we drew up:

{{gwi:5487}}

Ideally, we'd like to bring a bed of mulch starting where the sidewalk meets the driveway, wrap it around the sidewalk to the front of the house and then wrapping it around to the side of the house. We are still debating whether we should connect the mulch bed in front of the house with the mulch around the large tree on the left.

We'd like some hedges and possibly hydrangeas in front of the porch. Something that probably comes up to the middle of the railing and not higher. The previous bushes were too big and covered up too much. We'd like something pretty low maintenance as we don't have much of a green thumb. We were thinking of going with a dark mulch to contrast the lighter blue foundation color. And to add, there's a large bush (similar to the two we cut down) on the right side of the house that you can see in the first picture that we are leaving up as it covers our trash cans. We are planning on just removing the rocks and adding mulch. We are planning on keeping the rocks around the trees but building it up a little higher in the front so it looks like more of a wall. Since we plan on moving the radius of the circle in, we will have much more stone to use in the front.

My next step is to remove all the white rocks (fun fun). I think I'm going to reuse them on the sides of the house. There are currently white rocks there but they need to extra added.

So I wanted to see if anyone had thoughts on our design? Maybe any recommendations on some low maintenance bushes? Possibly some boxwoods that would look nice? Hydrangeas.. Good idea or bad? Will a nice grass edging look ok on the rest of the mulch bed? I haven't found any edging products I like. I'm only using the stones around the trees because we currently have them to reuse.

Thanks for your thoughts!