Landscaping

When we bought our house, it had a very well established shrub/hedge system as you would call it.

(sorry for the snow. Its the only picture that has the full view of the front of the house)

At first it looked nice until it came time for them to be trimmed.Then we wondered what exactly was the woman thinking the owned the house prior to us with putting in all these bushes. Bushes are nice, but when you let them get so big then its a bit ridiculous. The first year we had a bush cut down in the front yard that became one of the gardens in the front. We had a large tree cut down that was pretty much dead and then we had a giant cone shaped bush cut down that became my garden in the back.

Spring 2009 we had half of the far left tree cut down in the bottom picture. We also had the 3 small shrubs cut down behind it and then the inside Rhody was cut down in the middle under the window with the AC in it.

Spring 2010. We had another tall cone shaped shrub cut down on the other side of our garage since Seth kept hitting it with his car and we were going to be putting up a fence there before Aiden's birthday party so that Aiden couldn't get out of the yard.  And we had second Rhody in the backyard cut down in prep for the patio to be built.

Spring 2011. We had the front half of the shrubs cut off under the bay window in the living room.

Sept 2012- This is now what the front of the house looks like. Last weekend we had another 8 shrubs cut down and we are considering taking out 2 more smaller ones since we don't think they will survive if we have them moved to a more spacious location. So we are not sure what we want to put in. Something different. Most of the flowering bushing around the house are either rhodies or azaleas. We do have a white mountain
laurel on the side of the house. I did see a shrub that I liked that did not get too big so we may go with 2 of those, but the house looks so much better now that it doesn't look so overgrown with shrubs. You can actually see the house now. And it looks a little bit bigger as well.

Side of the house

 Much cleaner now.

You can see how the tall bush in the middle was being pushed over by the huge corner bush that used to be there. We're hoping that in a year or two it will start to fill out in the back. I might have to stake it with some rope to get it to straighten out.