Landscaping Ideas

[mimstrel]

Hello,

I'm new - just posted a short intro in the introductions forum so forgive me for repeating myself a bit. I am in the process of buying the house that I currently rent. The property is just over half an acre, the majority of which is a wooded ravine. I am planning an addition on the back of the house, so the landscaping is beginning in the front, where construction isn't going to destroy anything.

I'm in the northern portion of zone 5, in Eastern Iowa.

But let me start with the back just to sketch in the details (if you don't care or are TL,DR, skip to the last paragraph). The back property boundary is a very steep grade, a few trees but otherwise mostly bare. There is a lot of brick and chunks of concrete, the kind of stuff that gets dumped on such slopes over time. I would love to do something to stabilize this grade but I'm not sure there's a lot I can do.
I'm going to fence in the entire yard, up to the bottom of the back hill, and I would love to have both clear, usable space under the trees, as well as skin-friendly native plants - right now it's full of poison ivy and sticky burs.
The opposite face of the hill is more variable in slope and has trees and some plants that I want to keep (black raspberries, yum!) but is going to need stairs at the least and I'm thinking maybe a couple of layers of terracing and retaining walls. The layout and plans for this are in constant flux but I have a couple of years before I'll get to it.
At the top of the hill, the lawn starts. One side of the back lawn forms a bit of a bowl and I'm thinking that will make a great patio area with an outdoor fireplace and water feature. The other side of the lawn is gently sloped all the way up through the side yard to the street.

Okay. Here's where the current landscaping stands.

I have always wanted a Japanese maple tree, so I selected a hardy variety and planted it in the side yard by the deck. This is a sheltered, east-facing location that gets good morning sun but shaded in the afternoon and doesn't get blasted by the wind like the front yard and the west face. For under the maple tree, I got some leafy things, ummm... caladium. White with red and green spots, really pretty. Then I got a bleeding heart, another "always wanted one" plant, to fill in the next spot in that bed, and there is an existing hosta at the edge of the deck that is probably going to survive the great hosta transplant by virtue of being an especially nicely shaped hosta.

Down the side of the house are the hostas that are going to get uprooted and moved. I have a line down one half of the front of the house that is doing really well but the other side of the front of the house only has two rather pathetic flowers that would be lovely if the deer and woodchucks didn't eat the tops off them every year. So the weird, flat hostas from the east side of the house are going to go there and I haven't decided yet if I'm going to leave the flowers or leave them and plant a couple more between the hostas to balance them out. Hopefully the hostas will grow a little better out front but if they don't, well, I don't really like hostas that much. I have a miniature rose that will probably replace them on the east side of the house.

The front yard is about 7 feet deep from the sidewalk to the front of the porch. It's not very hospitable. It's windy, it's dry, half of it is directly underneath my huge pine tree, it gets full sun in the afternoon and there's nothing that anybody can do about it. This is where I really need some help. What will grow here? I have a new lilac bush that I just planted. I have a climbing rose on order that I want to put on my fence. I'd like to bring in some native plants but I'm not sure anything is going to survive the circumstances coupled with my not-very-green thumb. My understanding is that there are plenty of perennials that are pretty hardy once established, I'm just not confident in my ability to get them established up there. I'm also pretty selective about which plants I really like, but there's not necessarily any rhyme or reason to what I like and what I don't. I tend to prefer things that are a little unusual in some way, even if it's just an unusual color or multi-color variety of something common. Suggestions welcome.

 

[Beth_B]

Well! Sounds like you have a great project and probably lots of options. Your description of your front yard with the fir tree sounds very similar to my last house...Small front yard, on a slope, with a big fir tree dominating everything. And it faced west so it got sun all afternoon. Plus it had crappy, clay soil.

I eliminated the grass in that front yard and planted a mix of ground cover and perennials. For ground cover: ajuga, vinca and bishops weed (all spreading perennials.) Flowering perennials included yucca, dahlias, Shasta daisies and black eyed susans. I recall the black eyed susans didn't do well close to the fir tree but thrived out from under the canopy shade. I also had ferns, some sort of small red Japanese variety that did well.

Can you post a photo of the space? Visuals help!

 

[MaryMary]

Welcome to the forum, Congratulations on your new house, and Yay!! - no packing and moving!!
Several thoughts occurred while reading your post, so I'm just going to skip around a bit.

Rather than start every post saying what zone you are in, it might be easier for you if you post it on your user profile page. (here)

The back property boundary is a very steep grade, a few trees but otherwise mostly bare. There is a lot of brick and chunks of concrete, the kind of stuff that gets dumped on such slopes over time. I would love to do something to stabilize this grade but I'm not sure there's a lot I can do.

I have a Rodale's gardening book, and in it I read that Malaysian farmers plant asparagus on steep slopes because the roots prevent erosion. (I tried to google for a cite, but google-fu failed me.) It would take years before the plants were big enough to help much (or harvest!) but since you said the back was not the first thing you were working on, I figured I'd throw it out there! (Plus, the seeds are not that expensive!)

Another plant that would help would be milkweed. They have deep taproots, and most spread by rhizomes, so they would help "nail that down."

native plants -

I mainly went looking for things to plant in the front, since you're working on that first. If you want Iowa perennial natives, full sun, dry soil, look here: http://www.wildflower.org/plants/co...01=1&height_02=1&1&pagecount=10&pagecount=100 It's a fairly user-friendly site, you can change your settings if you want to choose things like bloom color or bloom time. I set the height at up to 3' because I didn't think you'd want anything higher than that in front.

Have you started a compost pile? If you can add a good bit of organic matter to the soil out front, it will help it to retain moisture.

For under the maple tree, I got some leafy things, ummm... caladium.

These are probably not perennial in your zone, (they're not in mine,) so you'll have to dig them up and store them over the winter if you want to keep them.

Can you post a photo of the space? Visuals help!

I'll second that!!

 

[mimstrel]

I will try to get a couple of pictures posted in the next couple of days. I want to get the brick, additional caladiums, and most of the mulch down in that area and then I will break out the camera. I do have one spot in that area that is being saved for one of my rose bushes. I love miniature roses but I'm not good at overwintering potted plants, so I have some on order now that I can put them in the ground. I ordered a couple more today because they were on sale. And I have space.

Regarding compost pile - building a compost bin is on my list of things to do this week. Until this winter, grass clippings and vegetable peels were thrown into the old foundation on the near side of the gully, but when I decided to buy the property I decided that I want to build a studio on that foundation so instead I have to dig out all of the accumulation. And, as with pretty much everything in the back 2/3 of the property, I discovered that most of what is there, is brick. Great - I don't have to buy anything for edging garden beds! but makes it difficult to dig in, or to get out a reasonable amount of usable organic matter.

Milkweed sounds like a great idea for the back slope. I'm not sure I want to climb it to harvest asparagus. Actually, that part of the yard I do have a picture of:

Thanks for the link! I'm off in the world of native plants. I have a couple of favorites that I definitely want to get (columbines and false indigos)but other than that I have no idea. Which makes online shopping hard; until I already know what I want, I prefer to see things in real life before I buy. It may not give me a full idea of the size the plant will grow to, but it's easier to see the shape and true colors in real life than online.