Landscaping - Texas Style

Did I mention how busy we were over the weekend? Jason and I had a game plan set in motion all last week and that was to FINALLY do something about our front yard.

You can see the progression above from when we first moved in, to what it looked like last week before we landscaped and what it looks like now. The original yard wasn't horrible but it was overgrown, the front door was a hideous shade of deep mauve and it looked like everyone else's yards: shrubs, bushes and more shrubs. Yuck. Then we just decided to rip everything out, cut the trees back and just live with it all last year. It looked way better in our opinion although I'm sure our neighbors would have thought otherwise.

And now? Ah, it's exactly how we envisioned it: a Texas theme with a touch of tropical.

Obviously, when everything gets established, it will begin to fill in and some plants will become taller and larger than others and that's what we look forward to.

We kept some plants that we just left from before: lantana, the crepe myrtle, the variegated liriope, the wandering jew and we moved some canna that was on the side of the house to a new home in the front. Above is what we have up front now, a few plants got left out but I think we did pretty good.

Our favorite plants by far that we knew we wanted were the agave plants. These things are so ancient-looking and everything about them is amazing: the coloring, their shape, their texture. Plus, did you know that tequila was made from Agave? There's your daily useless info for the day.

Despite the rugged landscaping that we wanted, I still wanted to soften it up with flowers. Plus I'm the hippie that wonders where all the honey bees have gone and I wanted them to have a home at our house. I'm so weird. But I do have to say: If you plant it, they will come. And come the bees did! I also had this CRAZY looking moth that stopped by within the first our of us planting the sciabosa. I knew these would attract butterflies, but this thing was just crazy looking. It was literally the size of a hummingbird and it flew just like one too. Does anybody know what this moth is called? I would love to know!

And since I'm into re-using/re-purposing anything, we had these rocks in our garage that were left over from the backyard retaining wall (remember THIS?). I thought it would be cool to have them randomly in the front garden, looking like they had always been there so we angled them this way and that way to make it look like we planted around what was there. Oh and don't adjust the brightness of your screen, those purple flowers are the BRIGHTEST flowers, especially for a dark purple, that I have ever seen. They seem to glow, weird.

Well, that's it for the front yard! Now all we need to do is get a new fence and we'll be set! We'll be fixing up our back yard in the next few weeks, it needs some new plants and just a little fluffing.