Landscapes are fluid and ever evolving. In this case, the clients’ DIY interest in native plants blossomed mid-way through their landscape development in their home of twenty years. You can clearly see the early exotic selections, closely planted to the home’s foundation, mixed with later musings of native perennials. The result is a somewhat chaotic composition. The client has great native plant knowledge but needed some assistance in designing a cohesive front yard landscape that feels in proportion to the home and the surrounding environment. Many existing plants were able to be transplanted and repurposed in locations better suited to their preferred growing conditions. Below we detail our thought process when designing a landscape renovation like this one in Westchester, New York.
Expand Planting Beds to Incorporate Disjointed Planting
In this front yard, nearly all the beds felt overcrowded, and there were two specimen trees in the lawn that felt disjointed from the rest of the landscape. By expanding the bed along the walkway to be wider and envelope the specimen trees, the overall feel moving through the landscape is less constricted and more open.
The expanded planting area also allowed us to add more native ornamental grasses to act as a unifying matrix layer, with multi-season interest and texture. Matrix layers create consistent visual backgrounds that let colorful perennials shine and help outcompete weeds. We included three of our favorite native grasses, Little Bluestem (upright, structural habit, blueish foliage, red/purple fall color), Prairie Dropseed (fountain habit, feathery plumes of golden seedheads, medium size) and Purple Lovegrass (groundcover height, purple airy seedheads) for a varied yet unified background layer in a range of heights.
Move Foundation Plantings Away from House
The expanded front yard beds were also the result of needing to improve air circulation around the house. If shrubs are planted too close together or to the house, it can encourage mold growth on the siding and powdery mildew on plants.
We designed and installed a decorative stormwater apron against the house, consisting of a filter fabric base, layered with gravel, river rock, and Mexican beach pebbles for contrast. Boulders create sculptural accents and the whole system is kept neat by curvilinear aluminum edging. Gravel and river rock help slow down stormwater runoff and allow it to infiltrate into the groundwater. It also does not create any splashing against the siding, unlike soil/mulch when hit by intense storm events.
Edit Yourself! Right Native Plant, Right Place
During the consultation and site visits with the client, we reviewed which old exotic shrubs were no longer desirable, and which felt appropriate to keep in the landscape. The client reported that she had planted several “dwarf” cultivars that reverted to their original size, and for other plants, her taste had simply changed as her knowledge of native plants grew. We removed golden arborvitae entirely and transplanted the hostas, astilbes, and PJM Rhododendrons to create a shady underplanting beneath the existing Leyland Cypresses on the property border.
The Leyland Cypresses were quite mature and had very little mid-level screening capacity. They were also planted too close together and were now competing for nutrients and light. We removed every other tree in the front yard to enable lusher growth and added leatherleaf viburnum to the underplanting for semi-evergreen mid layer screening of the neighbor’s house.
An existing front yard roadside bed had good elements, like eastern beebalm and creeping juniper, but also had some out of scale elements, like large hydrangeas that obscured the view of the architecture. We opted to transplant the hydrangeas the backyard, effectively screening the driveway parking area from the back patio.
With the newly opened bed space, we added native perennials to fill seasonal gaps, particularly in spring and fall. Where possible, we repeated existing desirable plants to give them more visual strength. Native asters were sprinkled in amongst the ornamental grasses for a stunning autumnal combination. More aggressive native perennials, like Spiderwort, were transplanted to areas in the side yard where they could spread and not overwhelm other plants.
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