Truly nothing to see here!
In our master-planned community, most residents pride themselves on how their houses look from the outside. Some of my neighbors in particular have expertly crafted their front yard landscaping into Yard of the Month Hall of Fame candidates. And, unfortunately for us, that includes our neighbors on both sides of our house.
Oh, we used to have nice landscaping a couple years ago. We had hired a company to redo our front yard, and it looked great. Until a catastrophic (for anything green and living!) sprinkler system failure wiped out most of the population. All that was left were some scraggly plants, weeds, and a couple of extremely tall crape myrtles hovering over our roof. No chance of a Yard of the Month sign ever gracing our yard, I’m afraid. Maybe the Ugly Yard of the Month pick.
Sidebar: In our community, our association office is quick to shoot us a “fix it or else!” letter if something looks bad around our house. Like if our garbage is out front too soon. Or if we have grass growing between the cracks in our driveway or sidewalk. But in the couple years that we’ve had basically dead, disgusting front landscaping, we’ve heard nary a peep from the association enforcers. Maybe they were just too stunned to react!
Our front yard looking even worse!
After we recently had the crape myrtles cut down by our tree service, seeing the shoots springing back to life around the stumps was like a cold splash of water on my face. I needed to leap into action! I liked the landscaping that my neighbor Sylvia had done; she recommended the service, Frank’s Nursery, which is in the little town next to ours.
The pathetic bench was the Mister's idea. It just added to the dismal effect, though.
Within a week, I had talked to Frank (a great guy!), and this past Wednesday his crew came out and was ready to change our repugnant front yard into something we could look at with pride. Instead of chagrin. And loathing.
And the result after a day and a half of work?
Wow!
And that’s just the right side of the house! How about the left?
Yep, it even features a walkway.
I especially love the walkway from the sidewalk to the driveway! Because of the way our tree on that side is situated, the grass doesn’t grow near what passed as a flower bed. We had put some flagstones there, but they weren’t enough to disguise the problem. Frank and his crew designed the walkway to eliminate the obstacle . . . and it looks great, too!
Orange ixoras
We don’t have a lot of plants in the front beds, but what we have looks pretty . . . for now, of course. I had never heard of ixoras, but I like the way they look. One side of the front has orange ones.
Yellow ixoras
While the other side features yellow.
Roses!
And then there are our many rose bushes. Yes, we have roses, of all things!
Pink rose
Sylvia cocked a skeptical eyebrow when she saw them . . . skeptical because she knows how lame we are with anything flora. I could see she was wondering what the roses’ life spans would be stuck in our care. “Poor, pitiful roses,” was the thought bubble emanating from her head.
I couldn’t blame her for thinking that. Quite honestly, I was glad that Frank decided to put several rocks in the beds, because—let’s face it–even we can’t kill rocks!
Reddish-pinkish rose
Frank did tell us to fertilize the roses in a month and then twice more in a year. So we’re going to do our best to make sure they don’t die prematurely. Updates to follow!
Plenty of space for a Yard of the Month sign!
Now that we’re keeping up with our neighbors with great-looking landscaping, we’re ready to be selected as the Yard of the Month in our neighborhood.
Except there’s just one little problem—our community did away with its Yard of the Month program a couple years ago . . . about the same time our front landscaping died. We’ll just have to make due with being satisfied that once again we fit in and aren’t known for being the ugly house on the block . . . for as long as possible!
Subscribe to RSS Feed
