Ground cover is, I agree, appropriate to many situations. Prolly not to this one, though, given the OP's concern about his lawn. (He'll likely have to give up having any gorgeous grass in that sideyard.) Whether water is precious depends on where you are. Dallas? Yes. BUT...you don't need St. Augustine in Dallas. All hail Bermuda grass there! Houston? Rarely is there a drought severe enough to cause a temporary water concern. As for there, St. Augustine or "stickers" are your choices. Mobile, AL, is another place that needs St. Augustine. And rain? Try the rainiest city in the lower 48! Different regions have different concerns--some have water concerns, while fertilizer runoff is a lot more troublesome in others. (Apparently, the strawberries that annoy me so in my grass? A noxious invasive exotic. Great. Suggestions for getting rid of them or even controlling them? Pretty darned feeble, as far as I can tell.) Trying to nurse a lawn that won't ever do very well into a state of verdant, glowing health is going to do a lot more damage than watering a lawn up to two times a week in August in many places. 1" per week *includes* natural rainfall and only applies to the growing season, BTW. Areas that need St. Augustine that I've lived in have ranged from 36 to more than 40 inches of rain per year, on average. That's not much water. It's less than I had to put on my "xeric" plants in NM while they were getting established. (You should have seen me panicking when I first planted them and they started to wither even though I was watering them, in my mind, "all the time"--meaning once a week. *snort* Yes, in a high-wind, high-elevation, semi-desert environment!) I am ALL for choosing a low-maintenance ground cover--*where it works*. I haven't found a single satisfactory replacement for a lawn for kids to play on. I've looked. "Light to medium foot traffic" groundcovers won't do it, though goodness knows I wish they would. And many people live in areas in which replacing a "merely decorative" front yard is either culturally unacceptable--take that as you will--or is actually explicitly restricted by covenants or zoning laws. And that's assuming that the OWNERS like them. In those cases, the best you can do is make large beds which you can try to make as low-maintenance as possible. (Honestly, for 9/10ths or more of people, high maintenance is a bad idea from any standpoint, anyway. Vacations, boredom, illness, business--all of these things would intervene in a strict routine of trimming, spraying, fertilizing, etc., etc., to such an extent that the landscape would soon look pretty pathetic. And so often does! I am WAY too lazy to do that and bitterly, bitterly disappointed that I'll have to water the slope in back next year at least four times to keep back that $%# crab grass.) As for Lyme disease--I'd rather not have my kids--or the neighbors' kids--get it by playing in my yard. I can check myself after going out. I can trust other adults to do it, too. Stripping down elementary schoolers every time they go outside--and in summer, they're banging in and out all the time--is practically insane, but it was the only alternative to treating the 1/8th of an acre that's the major play area last year. We had started averaging, literally, a tick a week. I looked up the incidence of tick-borne diseases in our area, and the statistics were NOT good. Now, I hate using pesticides. This was the first time that I'd personally applied them. I'm killing all sorts of critters I'd LOVE to have in my back yard, but if it's that or a sick kid, I'm grabbing my bag of pesticide. Of course, I COULD just keep the deer out somehow. If you can suggest an effective and economical way of keeping deer out of a 2-acre spread, part of which is wetland, please do! *g* I mean really, I'd love to know, 'cuz I have an azalea that's looking bedraggled nearly 2 years after some young buck decided that it was an all-you-can-eat salad bar for several week running. I have another question, though, purely hypothetical at this point. In one area I lived in, we wouldn't get a hard freeze once every four years or so. And in those years, no matter how we treated the dogs (pills, sprays, collars, what-have-you), they would bring in hundreds of fleas--dozens with every trip outside--that would set up home and eat people and pets constantly. The dogs went piebald with scratching, and we were covered in bites. How can you get rid of fleas at that level of infestation without using a pesticide? We did every de-flea-your-house trick known to man, BTW, from vacuuming more than once a day to the dust that dessicates them. After going through every other option the first year, my dad (who, BTW, has a master's degree in a wildlife field!) broke down and went the poison-the-yard route--which worked beautifully, knocking back the numbers hard enough that bites were rare rather than constant. I do want to makes a BIG point about using "organics." Raw sewage is organic. It is also devastating to the environment. Soooo many gardeners like to make a big point about how they only use ORGANIC compost/worm castings/whatever on their plants. The streams really. don't. care. whether the nitrogen that gets dumped in them from your/my garden is from 100% certified premium organic sources or from cheapo-granulated nitrogen pellets. It doesn't make a difference! I like compost for all sorts of reasons, including reduced runoff and reduced chances of burning a plant because of slower release. But I don't pretend that there's "good organic nitrogen" and "bad inorganic nitrogen"--once it runs off, it's just plain ol' nitrogen. Sorry for sounding condescending--it was meant to be a drawl. ;-)

Hey Josh and a morning to you too! Boy, you are very keen on my plants! I should pick that, righ? Thanks buddy. Well, I learned my first lesson today~~~~ ! I lost that yellow flower due to too much sun! The sun came out for a couple of hours the other day and burnt it right off. Bummer. So I had to put this plant in morning sun with dabbled sunlight during the hottest part of the day. It is getting a new flower, so I hope to keep that one around longer. See? As the second flower you see on the right of the plant opens and ages, I will post for you all.

Correct images at http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/shrubs/msg0216504817442.html?3 Here is a link that might be useful: thread with euonymous images

FWIW I don't think a darker floor would conflict with your cherry floor-- as long as the tone is utterly different, it could look great. For the tile the key seems to be to get away from anything pink-ish or orange-ish. But all of the tiles you pick have that tone, so I would consider changing cabinet tone, maybe to something closer to your floor, and then the combo will be perfect. Even a lighter version of your floor would work. Maybe it's the cabinets that are throwing everything off instead of the floor! All of the tiles you like seem to be similar, so I would start with that and work from there. The tiles are lovely, just too pink/orange for the cabinets. Or, go darker with the tile, but we keep suggesting that and it isn't sounding good to you, so there must be a reason! I agree re: the dark grout-- it would look funny with that tile. With a slightly darker tile it could look awesome. Here's a tile that looks like the others you picked but without the pink tone: http://www.crossvilleinc.com/products_color.cfm?SeriesID=3&TileID=28&ref=products_browse Crossville is a fun place to look if you want to just browse a bunch of colors! Good luck-- you have beautiful choices and anything you pick will be fine. This is all just window dressing.