Not that we’ll be selling our house anytime soon, but we’ve been wanting to freshen up the front yard for a long time. The previous owners had planted these climbing, bushy plants which we hated; and there was a cypress of some sort that made me CRAZY (it’s spiky and prickly… planted right by my front steps… and I have a 3 year old and frequent 3 year old visitors…. bad, bad, bad idea! Plus it was a major pain to prune back.) So we ripped all of those out. There was also ivy, which was fairly tame when we moved in; but last spring I decided to train it up onto the concrete “wall” of our front steps and the brick surrounding the garage door. It didn’t have a great effect – it looked like the ivy was eating the front steps and Chris hated it. So we trimmed the ivy WAY back. We planted geraniums in the shared bed with the ivy, at the corners of the front flowerbed, and around the mailbox. We got “Patriot” hostas for our new bed that followed the curve of the stairs, and we put in a delphinium on the other side of the garage door while we were at it! I need to try to scrounge up a “before” picture, but here are the “afters.”
