Completed entry
Sprucing up a front foundation can be a challenge when you live out in the hills of central Wisconsin. Add the challenge of roaming, hungry deer.
The homeowners in this beautiful country home did not have time to maintain their landscape, leaving them with a mess of plantings and weeds coming up to their front door. After landscape designer Susan M. Murphy Jones designed their backyard entertainment area, they asked her to help with the front.
They needed ease of maintenance and order to the planting method. To assist with those priorities and cope with the limited plant selection and deer, Jones immediately thought stone! She pulled out existing plants and reused them in masses for a cleaner look.
To save money, she left the curving concrete walk in place and bordered it with beds of a mix of larger and smaller cobblestones. She added a new, crushed red-granite path that works off the concrete walk and leads around the property. To accent the front entry and complement the more natural look, she planted a large white spire birch clump. (“Feeling Curvy.” Backyard Solutions 2012: 27.)
Project type: Residential
Services provided: Landscape design, reused and organized existing plants, created low maintenance landscape, materials purchasing, general contracting, consulting, billing, follow-up
Year: 2010
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- Appearance of home upon arrival
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- Appearance of home before project began
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- This birch planting was designed to be the focal point of this naturalistic garden.
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- Ornamental grasses add a naturalistic interest to the front entry.
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- Unique weeping plants add impact and soften boulder placement.
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- Properly placed plant materials have room to grow.
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- Curving granite path leading from the front entry invites one through the garden gate. Front entry accented with bubbling boulder.
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- Granite path leads you to the garden gate.
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- Example of use of existing shrubbery moved with an excavator and given more space to grow.
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- Attention to detail in the placement of hen and chicks.
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- Completed low maintenance, naturalistic entry.
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- Complementary landscape element utilizing relocated conifers in a weak area of the landscape. In the future, this will grow into a full, handsome border.
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- Out the side door.
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- Beautiful balsam adds a coordinating vertical element adjacent to patio.
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- Staircase of lannon stone accented with weeping cypress and grasses.
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- Flagstone path that leads you to the staircase.
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- Controlling erosion with boulders and rock.
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- Nothing more beautiful that a stone staircase.
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- Tightly constructed concrete block walls.
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- Complementary foliages add interest.
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- Design plan created by Susan Murphy-Jones
