I know next to nothing about ornamentals but wanted to say welcome. You have a beautiful house!

Diane

Thanks! It's still a work in progress. :)

Ashley, welcome! You do have a beautiful house! Gardening is a work in progress to say the least! You have a bed started at least and a tree planted, you are on your way! I reviewed your list of plants you are considering, and had a few comments!
You don't have much space it appears, but in front of the window on the left of your front door, you could add dwarf burford hollies, they are dark green foliage, everygreen and produce some red berries on them for added beauty! Very low maintenance and I have many along the front of my home for foundational plant. You would only need 3. You could use a specimen plant on the far left or corner of your house with height, like nellie r stephens holly, which also gets red berries and is one of the best and widely used specimens. That would take care of one end, the middle and you could then add an ornamental grass on the front corner, closer to the walk and near your front door and a rock near it! My landscaper gave me two Dwarf Fountain Grasses last year-Little Bunny! It is the smaller of the grasses and just the right size for your bed. YOu mentioned Hardy Ice Plant, which is one of my favorites! Doesn't need much water and blooms ALL summer and looks great around rocks! Best of all, is a perennial!
You may want to think about bringing your bed our further for more space if you add foundational bushes along the house to leave room for FLOWERS! Double knock-out rose bushes are awesome, easy to take care of, low maintenance and bloom profusely, but can get 3-4 feet wide and tall! They require lots of sun for blooming also! Goldmound spirea bushes are easy and beautiful as well! I have had at least 3 in each home I've lived as they are actually gold leaved and flower in the spring also! Just sharing some of my favorites and some plants my landscapers have used alot in our area! Once you get your foundational speciments picked out, you can fill in slowly with your personal favorite flowers and plants! It is fun and I wish you success and fun as you figure out what will work best and what you like! Make sure you follow-up with your finished project, would love to see new pics!
Take care,
Denise

Ashley,

The photos you like are from a yard in Long Island, New York, so the plants, while very lovely, don't have to deal with the same harsh summer conditions we have here. (Their "hot" is not even the same as our "hot" even though we all are in zone 7.) Just thought I'd throw that in because often we admire yards from other parts of the country, but sometimes we can't use some of those plants here in our climate or they bloom earlier in our climate and all are not in bloom together. Also, the landscapes in the photos you like were done by a person who is a garden designer and, yes, the design is amazing, as you'd expect from someone who designs gardens. : )

First of all, you need to figure out what kind of soil you have---clay, sand, sandy loam, silt, etc. because the kind of soil you have will help determine what you can grow. I would guess you have sandy loam or clayey loam but I'm just guessing.

Secondly, even more importantly, you need to know if your soil is alkaline or acidic. Some parts of Oklahoma have extremely alkaline soil, some have acidic soil, and some have soil that is close to neutral. Different plants grow well in soils with different pH factors, so figure out your soil pH before you start to plant.

From looking at the photo of your home, which I've linked below for other folks so it is easier to view, it looks like your beds are not very deep. How deep are they? Three feet? Four feet? More? As small as the beds are, you will have to select smaller plants or the beds will get too crowded very quickly and will look too "busy". Or, if you want to have a lot of plants, you could enlarge the beds before you try to plant too much.

You also have to be careful and select smaller plants until your shrubs get some height to them or the taller flowers will shade out parts of the shrubs which can lead to uneven growth and a mis-shapen form.

Take Malva "Zebrina", for example. Just a couple of months after planting, one plant can be 3 feet wide or wider and 3 to 4 feet tall and it would overwhelm the small shrubs. I use a lot of Malva "Zebrina" and hollyhocks, for example, but I have a two story house so I have deeper beds--some of mine are 12'-15' deep (deep meaning horizontally wide, not soil that deep), so I have the space in front of taller shrubs to plant taller flowers. You don't have that sort of space in your current beds, though, so you have to be careful in selecting taller flowers.

Unless the beds are deeper than they appear to be in the photo, the following plants on your list would tend to get too large for the space you have: four o'clocks, tall phlox, tall cannas (you might be able to grow the dwarf cannas but you'll probably have to dig and divide them every year to get them from taking over the shrubs' space), hibiscus, Russian Sage (there is at least one named dwarf Russian sage that doesn't get as large as the others and it might be a possibility) and maybe Autumn Sage.

You can't have hostas on the south side of your house because they need shade and would struggle in the hot July and August sun without a lot of shade.

You don't want chameleon plant because it is very invasive.

I don't know about silver lace vine on the south side of a house. It is not crazy about our summers and normally does best on the east or north side of a house where it has some protection from the summer sun and the southerly winds that are so dominant during the hot months.

These plants are good candidates for your beds, but not too many of them unless you enlarge the beds:

Globe Amaranth
Gazania Daisies
Cosmos (the dwarf ones only, like Cosmic Orange or Cosmic Red or Cosmic Yellow or the dwarf Lady Bug line because some of the taller ones would get 4' to 5' or taller and overwhelm the shrubs)
Stonecrop
Hardy Ice Plant (only if you have well-drained soil)
Yarrow
Lantana (not generally reliably hardy in zone 7, but sometimes comes back for 2, 3 or 4 years if the soil drains well and the winters are kind)
Verbena (the perennial ones can spread out 4' wide but the annuals stay manageable)
Daylily (if carefully selected and placed--some of them get huge too, so you'd want smaller ones)
Zinnias (choose the smaller ones (height-wise) like the Dreamland or Magellan or Zahara series that get maybe 12" to 16" high. Some zinnias get 4' tall or taller and about as wide and they'd be too large for your current beds)

If you are doing to put a bed on the west side of the house that would be 4' to 5' wide, you could fill it with flowers and many of the ones you listed--both tall and short ones--would be great for a location like that where you don't have to worry about the flowers burying the slower growing shrubs.

So, if you are going to keep the beds their current size, I'd go with smaller, shorter plants like gazanias or blanket flowers for the first couple of years in order to give the shrubs time to gain a little height after width. After that, you can carefully add some of the taller plants you like, but slowly and in moderation so the bed won't be overfilled.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:1085436}}

Denise,

How old are your Dwarf Burford Hollies? I ask, because Dwarf Burfords are often sold with a description that says they get 5 to 6' tall and wide and that is not true. Dwarf Burford is dwarf ONLY in relation to the height of regular Burford Holly which can easily exceed 20 to 25' in both height and width. In fact, any shrub can be called a dwarf even if the only part of it that is smaller than the standard is the size of the leaf. So, the term 'dwarf' is relative and not really that meaningful.

I deliberately chose Dwarf Burford hollies because I wanted giant moster-sized shrubs that would get very tall so they would be the right scale for our two-story Victorian style house. They are the back row of plants in very deep beds with shorter shrubs in front of them and flowers in front of the shorter shrubs. My Dwarf Burfords are about 6 or 7 years old and the shortest is about 8' tall and the others are closer to 10'. I expect them to reach 12'-15' at maturity in another few years. All of them are at least 5' wide and they get wider every year but shouldn't get wider than 7' to 8' when mature.

I know people who have planted Dwarf Burford Hollies about 2' from the house (I planted mine about 4' from the house and that may be too close) and have loved them the first 2 to 4 years and then hated them when they got to be about 10 years old and 15 feet tall. One of our local vets planted them alongside the front area of his clinic, between the building and the parking lot, many years ago. They are about 18" from the building and about 15-18' tall. They are now pruned up tree form but they still look all wrong for that location. You can't park too close to the building, or the hit you in the head! (They lean out from the building over the parking lot.) I really like and respect our vet, but he put the wrong plant in that location.

Nellie R. Stevens Holly is another that gets much taller and wider than most people realize and, therefore, requires very careful placement so it doesn't crowd the house. At maturity, it can easily be 15-30' tall and probably 10-20' wide if grown in good soil and given adequate water.

Of course, you can try to keep these hollies a manageable size as they grow by pruning them back hard every year, and sometimes multiple times per year, but it is a losing battle and you tend to end up with big, fat, stubby branch ends barely hidden by new green growth.

Before planting or recommending any shrub, it is always a good idea to be sure you know how big it gets at maturity. Shrubs that look so innocent and cute in 1- or 2-gallon pots and then look all nice in the ground the first couple of years can grow amazingly fast and you often don't realize you've got a shrub that wants to be a tree. A big tree. : )

I don't like to plant really large shrubs and then prune them repeatedly to try to keep them 1/5th the size the want to be. You end up with big green boxes that look so unnatural. The great Texas gardening guru, Neil Sperry, always says that if you want unnatural green boxes in front of your house that you just ought to buy plywood, build wooden boxes, paint them green and put them in the garden. It makes me laugh every time he says it, but he has a point.

I was wondering if I was the only person on earth who is always advising people to only select Dwarf Burford or Nellie R. Stevens if they want huge tree-type shrubs, so I googled and discovered I was not. (Link below.)

And, sometimes, you can tell people and tell people and they just won't listen. My hubby's best friend and his wife who were, at that time, landscaping their 4th or 5th home, ignored their son's advice (and ours too) and planted a row of red-tipped photinias about 1' from their wraparound porch and 2' from each other. Now, ten years later, you can imagine what huge monsters those tiny shrubs have become. In case you aren't familiar with Red-tipped Photinias, they can go from 1-gallon size to 12' to 15' high and 6-8' wide in about a decade, and they aren't even through growing yet. Just another example of a sweet and innocent baby shrub that wants to grow up to be Goliath.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Professional's Words On Dwarf Shrubs

Add to that Euonymus. I don't remember which one I planted in front of a porch 30 years ago, but one of our friends calls them Jungle bushes. I planted two on each side of a twenty foot porch. My Dad, who lives there now took a chainsaw to them a couple years ago and cut them back to three feet. They are at 7-8ft again. They are on a vacant cabin so he's just left them this year but is talking about wrapping a chain around the base and pulling them out with the tractor. He doesn't give me too bad a time about it because the hollies that Mom planted on either end of the house grew 15 ft tall. Those he took the chain saw to earlier this spring and brought them down even with the eave of the house. So good advice. Know how big they want to be.

And Crape Myrtles are constantly getting butchered because they will bloom on new wood. People buy Crepe Myrtle trees and want shrubs so wack them each year. They look awful!! There are types that stay small so there's no reason not to have naturally small ones.

The very BEST advice I can give:

Walk, ride a bike, and lastly, drive around your neighborhood, and others within 15 miles. Look at the yards. See, what you like. Take a picture if you want, or ring a doorbell, and see if the folks would love to share their gardening secret. Lots of people do. Share their knowledge.

That way, you will see plants that will work in your climate.

Moni