Landscapper I Am Not :(

This is my house...

We bought it last summer and the people that lived there didn't do anything with the gardens and since we moved in during the summer we didn't have time either...so they became over grown. This photo was taken last summer just after we moved in. It is hard to see but along the sidewalk is the flower bed and it they have what is called Gold Flame Spirea...

It is supposed to look like this and is a pretty red colour in the fall, but as you can see they had 5 plants of it in this garden and it was taking over the garden :( When we started digging this plant out this week it was so tall and overgrown that we couldn't get at the plant without cutting all the 'branches' off of it first. It has flowers on it in the summer a kind of purple colour but they remind me of a stink weed, not real pretty...

We removed all 5 of these plants and now have a huge whole in the garden :(

The second section of the garden is this Mugo Mughus Pine it is supposed to be a dwarf plant that isn't supposed to get higher than 4' tall...well according to the woman at the garden center these things can get as tall as any other pine tree. She made a reference I thought was kind of funny, she said 'a lot of people get these kind of like they do St. Bernards, they are real cute and tiny and then they turn out to be really big'

They are kind of cool as like a hedge or if you had a huge yard but we don't and they don't really work in a flower garden :(

Then at the end of the garden is a Weeping Siberian Peashrub, a weeping caragana plant. It is different and kind of neat but as you can kind of see from the first picture it is right at the end of the driveway, on the corner and it causes a lot of banging into the house or the vehicles as it is kind of in an ackward spot.

We are considering leaving it there depending on how the rest of the garden turns out ?

Along the front of the house there is a huge patch of daylillies and a sensation lilac bush which we are hoping to keep just to down size. We also have some kind of apple tree, a weird tree with little berries and a dying pine tree in the front yard.

We think that the people that did the landscapping in our yard just went to the greenhouse and said 'ooh that is pretty' and didn't research whether or not it would work where they were putting it or not...in the backyard we have a lilac bush planted just under the edge of an apple tree???

I have never been a gardener, for several reasons...I hate weeding, I am allergic to cement and most gardens are against the sidewalk so if I sit on the sidewalk too long my butt gets itchy and I get a rash. They seem like a lot of work for it to look pretty for others to look at for a couple of months. Here summer is a short season and you spend most of the spring that you can get outside slaving to have a pretty yard for a couple of months and then slave so it will look nice again next year. Plus you don't look at it, I see it when I drive up to my house, other than that I am not really doing it for me I am doing it so the people that drive by will think I have a pretty yard. It seems crazy to me. But since we paid extreme amounts of money for a house I guess we should have a nice yard as well and that means a lot of work, a lot of money and a lot of expertise...all of which we don't have :)