Need Curb Appeal! Driveway Landscaping and very large front rock bed

5 years ago

The front drive as you can see needs a good amount of landscaping. We have some ideas but open to ideas/suggestions.

1st Area of Work: The driveway edging.
So we put in the asphalt drive on top of the old packed gravel drive. The one picture shows the flagstone type border on the edges of the asphalt. I’d like to do this but not sure how as some of the sides are hard from the old drive and we couldn’t pound them into the ground. Maybe we shouldn’t edge it in? Where the asphalt drive meets the front rock bed we took the old bricks out that separated the drive and rock bed and just put the rock up next to it...not sure that I like it.

2nd area of work: the sloped entryway to our drive from the road. Both sides to the driveway entrance have a sloped hill. We plan to rock this all. Someone told me to use medium rock as the small would just wash away...so The second picture shows what size I was thinking of getting. My problem here is I’m not sure how to landscape it. How do I hold the rock in from coming down the front. The plan is to follow the dirt lines up the side so it will narrow off the further we get up the drive and stop on each side just before you get to the camper.

The left side of the drive we have a little garden up there by in front there where the wheelbarrow is I wanted to do the wheelbarrow with the handles sticking up in the air and flowers planted in front of the barrel and then Blount the wagon wheel next to it.

The right side of the drive I want to put the posts with cast iron pot hanging. I want to do red rock lava instead of the mulch and put flowers in the pot rather than underneath. The stumps will be made into little “fairy” homes.

3rd area of work: Front Rock Bed- This area is huge and it just looks a mess to me. To the left you can hardly tell from the photos but there is another area bricked off the rock bed that was there when we moved in. We cleaned it up and put bushes in it and mulched it. We didn’t honk about chickens and the mess they would make with it. Now I have to get all of that mulch up and out of the rock bed. So I don’t know whether to keep this area or just take up the extra bricks, take the plants out (currently have squash in there too lol) and just seed it for grass?)
We are surrounded by trees so there are sticks and leaves in the rockbed non stop and I’m not sure of the best way to up keep this. Any ideas of what I can do with this area to clean it up and make it look less bland? My husband built me that nice wishing well to cover up a partially uprooted tree stump!

I’ll post our yard pics in the comments

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Yardvaark

5 years ago

At this point of the game, it seems like you are more concerned with adding cute vignettes than you are of getting the whole space under control. For now, I would concentrate on the latter and forget about the former. If you want privacy, there are better ways to do it than with low hanging limbs, which tend to read as neglect and make the surroundings feel dark and gloomy. It would be especially important to remove lower limbs from the vicinity of the drive and of the house. Those that are distant don't matter so much.

It looks like you have a need for lawn at the sunnier flat areas and for groundcover at the shady or sloped areas. I note that vines are growing up some of your trees. If this is English ivy, then it is already there and I suggest it will not make sense to use any other groundcover when you already have ivy in the vicinity. It would be too difficult to keep groundcovers from mixing and if they mix they both look weedy. While 20 or 30 people are probably going to jump on here and tell you how impossible ivy is to cohabitate with and that it is downright evil, my message is that it can be the lifesaver in a situation like yours where there is lots of shade. I found it easy to manage and a workhorse insofar as landscape functions are concerned. You can read about[controlling it in fair detail here.[(https://www.houzz.com/discussions/managing-hedera-helix-english-ivy-dsvw-vd~5352716?n=16) It would be good to plot out the tree trunk locations on a plan in order that your could make some sensible islands, dividing the grass purposefully from the groundcover areas. If you keep the divisions simple and straightforward, it will make mowing a lot easier.

The rock mulch area looks like a maintenance nightmare to me. It would be so much easier if it were a groundcover like English ivy and all you needed to worry about was mowing the grass at its edge. All the small tree litter would just be absorbed by the bed without any need to remove anything unless it is sticking up above the ivy surface. In the Fall, ivy eats most of what leaves that fall in it, so there is no need to rake it.

Adding the rock border to the drive seems OK to do, but not necessary. It could add to maintenance, since the grass edge would not be a simple straight line, but it would weave itself into the rocks. You would not install such an edge by "pounding" rocks into the ground but by excavating a trench and setting rocks in a base material.

The idea of lining the ditch with rocks (I don't really understand what you're proposing) seems fraught with peril. Having something like this work out right would probably be done by professionals. The homeowner installed versions are sometimes ghastly to look at as well as maintain.

The picture is showing opening up entrance approach by limbing up trees and creating islands. It doesn't purport to be exactly what you would do, but is a general theme that might inspire your planning.