Sometimes I get tired of seeing sights like this:

Fruit trees over pruned in late fall

Living in a community that seems to have a lot of do-it-yourself gardeners who don’t care that much often leads to a bunch of boring landscapes and horrible errors. But I wanted to get away from that for a second and show two landscapes recently that are spectacular. I’m too busy wimpy to talk to the actual owners, so just enjoy street pictures. Both front landscape feature an utter lack of front lawn. That’s not what you first notice however (some lack of front lawn yards are pretty scary), but a simple sidenote on the end. The first thing I noticed on both are plant composition.

Landscape 1

They’ve filled this front yard with contemporary style landscape plants. Nothing spectacular about the plant choice, but the overall composition is beautiful. Best part is every inch of space is packed with plants, and none of it is lawn. The only hesitation I have about this is that I hope they picked dwarf cultivars of about all woody material, because if not, this landscape will be pretty overgrown in five years. I took this picture just over a month ago, right when the mums where making a colorful appearance.

Landscape 2

This has a more naturalistic fill, using mainly rocks and ornamental grasses. There’s a little too much Karl Forester, but I still was quite captivated when I passed by this front yard. The grasses combine with the evergreens to create a great look now in late fall. This picture was taken a couple weeks ago, when I was fortunate to catch ornamental grasses at their peak.

I hope this has been a good distraction from pending snow and also presented some better options than lawn for the front yard. Again I want to point out that really what caught my attention wasn’t the lack of lawn in the front yard, it was the presence of a variety a plants and lots of thought behind them.