I would consider ornamental grasses as the main plant species since it is full sun. There are some smaller ones such as Blue oat grass (Helictotrichon sempervirens) that might work. You could include some taller ones as an accent every 8 feet or so. You could also include a conifer or different type of plant as an accent. The full sun next to the driveway is going to require a tough plant. Here is a link that might be useful: Plant groups This post was edited by ja-gardener on Fri, Jan 18, 13 at 22:28

While we are getting ready to replace our gravel with concrete, the previous owner place plastic under the gravel. It works well, with one observation to improve it. He should have provide a greater lap of the plastic sheets, possibly even bonding them with an adhesive. While there are few weeds in the middle of the plastic the weed that are there appear to be coming up between the sheets of plastic. With the plastic you will have to be careful during future maintenance as if torn you are back to the original problem.

A good gravel drive should be built up from grade a bit with subsoil (sand and clay, not black loam). There are a variety of soils good for this purpose. How you rock is important. It is best to start with larger "washed" or clean road stone. The amount depends on how much clay or loam is in your soil. 3" - 6" inches. This is the expensive stone. This rock needs to be worked down into the road until it disappears into the road (best done by heavy vehicles). You can also drive over it repeatedly after a rain to work in the tire tracks and try to level it off with a box scraper every so often to level off the rock over the tire marks so more stone work in where you drive. Once all that stone is worked in, put on the road stone with the fines. This will create the surface of the road, but the stone under it is absolutely necessary if you don't want to fight ruts constantly. It doesn't look like you'll be able to see either of those build sites from the road. You'll like a straight driveway more and more as you drive down it. I'm just finishing up a 3000' grave driveway.

Thanks for the collective insight. A few more details: The driveway is currently about four inches lower than the rest of the basically flat lawn. I would be raising the grade, but not creating a mound compared to the rest of the yard. Additionally, plants have NO PROBLEM growing in the gravel as is, and 4 inches of topsoil is the least I would want for a lawn, but the gravel is very porous, and is currently supporting a wide variety of lawn grasses, weeds, trees, etc... It isn't as though I'm planting over concrete, for what that's worth. The real issue with the cost is disposal. Renting and operating a bobcat is no problem, but the question becomes how to dispose of the dirt and gravel. The rest of the driveway will only absorb so much of it. I called waste management (the company, not the municipal department) and they could barely figure out who to point me towards because it isn't "recyclable" material (like driveway asphalt), and could be "contaminated" with what I'm not sure because it hasn't had a car parked on it in several years. Is broken up dirt/gravel/aggregate something that would be considered "clean fill" and someone would cart away for free from an ad on Craigslist?