In May we had the front/side garden relandscaped to reduce water usage. We got $2 per square foot of lawn removed in a rebate from the water district, which paid for just a small part of it, but we'd been meaning to do something about the front for a long time, so it got us moving ;-).
All the landscaping is with low maintenance and low water usage native plants that should require no more than a few waterings per year once the plants are well established, which will take 2 full years. (We have to wait 2 years before we even know what it was designed to look like!)
Here's some comparison pictures. Left are the "before" from November, after 2 years of no watering of the lawn. The right are pictures from just after installation.
The left front yard now has a path from the garbage bins to the sidewalk, which is a GREAT improvement for garbage day!
The right hand front yard has a few boulders, and the swath with the black ground cover will be a "meadow" of sturdy short grasses than can be walked on.
There's a 3rd boulder at the side yard, back in the corner of the meadow by the driveway. And, look! No ivy!!!
The weeping birch from the front by the path to the front door is unfortunately gone. It died last August. It seems that the reason they put all these birch trees in front lawns is because they can tolerate the huge amount of water that lawns require. Remove the lawn and the huge amounts of water, and they can't survive. We, of course, didn't know about this until after it up and died on us, so we couldn't save it with monthly waterings. Poot.
Its been almost 5 months now, so things are slightly more grown in, especially in the shady patch around the Japanese maple. However, I'm going to wait a little longer before I do some update pictures. The soil was not rototilled to death before putting in the plants, specifically so they would grow more slowly and be more hardy -- so nothing is going to look showy until at least next spring. Hopefully we'll have good rain this winter to help them establish.
