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Landscape Design Lawn Care New England Exchange

Landscape suggestions along the street

2 years ago

We just had a bunch of pine trees removed and are cleaning up the area between the street and our rock wall. Any suggestions for what to plant or cover this area with? We live in zone 6 with the threat of snow plows making this space messy. Thanks for your ideas!

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Comments (5)

mad_gallica (z5 Eastern NY)
2 years ago
Grass unless it is too shady. Then geranium macrorrhizum has done well for me against plows.

You may be able to get away with planting some things against the wall, so long as they are salt resistant, and can handle being cut down to the ground.

Don't get into a battle with the plows. They will win.
shalahmcd thanked mad_gallica (z5 Eastern NY)
Deni Dickler
2 years ago
Depending on the look you want, there are many native plants you could use. They are attractive while helping out the environment. If it's sunny you could have a pollinator garden, especially butterfly milkweed or common milkweed. Both are hardy and salt tolerant, if your road is salted. You could also go with a native or grass. Little bluestem or prairie dropseed are both easy to grow and tough as nails.
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I confess I stole the tree from some someone's garden on google, but it is probably a Japanese holly, Ilex crenata, and it takes topiary to get it into that shape, called "cloud pruned" -- or pompom. It can be done with a variety of trees, but the only practical way to get one is to buy it ready pruned. It's not hard to keep it in shape. The bad news, which I have only just found out, is that they cost a fortune. A beautiful alternative for the Japanese style would be a small weeping tree, such as a dwarf weeping cherry tree (below left), or a standard specimen of a similarly graceful shrub, such as Cotoneaster horizontalis (it's spring here, and mine is an absolute snowstorm of blossoms right now) or even a small wisteria. If you'd rather go with the pompom shape, you might look for a standard euonymous (below right) -- you can get specimens with two or three pompoms up the stem. Cotoneaster and euonymous are evergreen. You might also find something suitable and beautiful among the dwarf conifers. Talk to your local nursery experts.
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Crystal Ward
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I'd go with a micro clover.
Sigrid
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Pussytoes, creeping juniper. We have grass. It recovers pretty quickly, although our strip between stone wall and road (with hemlocks) is much steeper, so we tend to get gouges.
Jason, zone 7A, near Greensboro NC
2 years ago
My house has the same problem with plows. Worse, the DOT salts the road when there's a thread of snow or ice! So the runoff kills pretty much anything.

I LOVE your wall, though! So there's a lot of potential here.

After trying a million things, I ended up just using mondo grass. That stuff is indestructible!! I've sprayed it with Round Up, and I swear I can hear it laugh! LOL It's good in sun or shade, and I've never watered it once. I don't even plant it; I just dig up a bunch and sit it where I want it, and it will root itself.

https://www.monrovia.com/mondo-grass.html

My suggestion would be mondo grass along the base of the wall, and then dwarf mondo grass to the road if you can find it.

You can then plant annuals between the mondo grass in the Spring. And since they'll die at the end of Autumn, anyway, there's no real loss over the Winter.

Only downside is that, maybe one a year, you'll need to take a shovel down there and dig up any of the mondo grass that's outgrown where you want it.

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