Gardens @ The European Farmhouse

When we were building the new house, we lovingly called it the European Farmhouse and it stuck. As a new build, I knew I would be starting from scratch on the gardens. Having a blank canvas for the gardens was very exciting for me. I was ready to have full creative license to design it the way I wanted after always having to re-design something that was already planted and sometimes too close to the house or overgrown without enough spacing. Most builders will give you a landscaping package but it always seems like random plants and not well thought out or designed.

Though I was excited about starting from scratch on the gardens, the task seemed a little daunting with everything else we had to do to finish out the build. (I believe I’ve mentioned that the builder flaked out on us during the build). Therefore, we took on a lot of projects and responsibility of the build to get it finished enough to pass inspection and close, and then complete some of the finish out afterwards.

I remember that the sidewalks, driveway and patios were the last thing to get done before we could close. We had to find a concrete contractor because the builder wasn’t willing to do the more elaborate and costly design of the back patio and basically didn’t want to work on the build anyway, so no surprise there. The day we were scheduled to pour, it had rained and our concrete supplier cancelled on the delivery, not wanting to reschedule for another week, which would have thrown off our closing. The concrete contractor had laughed at my suggestion in calling another concrete supplier to finish the job, saying that he didn’t think he could get one for the next day and sure didn’t think I could get one! I remember thinking, “challenge accepted”. I got on the phone and found a concrete supplier, called the concrete contractor back and told him we were good to go for the next morning, needless to say he never questioned me again! 🙂 We had to pour the steps on the back patio separately and when he had trouble getting more concrete delivered, he told the supplier, well if you can’t get it to me this week, this lady will call someone else, so if you want to keep the business, lets work something out! LOL

In the chaos of finishing the build, the gardens got added to the end of that long list of priorities. At move in, in late August, the outside work still left to do included, fill dirt, top soil, finish-grading, and adding sod and irrigation, all of which took from late August to the end of October. In the beginning of November, we planted about 22 evergreen trees but had to put off planting anything else, due to winter and frost coming early. It was a good start!

In late Spring and early Summer this year, we finished the front garden bed and planted lavender, boxwoods and around 60 more trees. We did all of the plantings and design ourselves, because at this point I didn’t have the budget, nor did I have the trust reserves left to let someone else do it! Here is a look at the blank canvas with just the house when we closed on it. In this blog post, I will be showing you the front garden beds and the front of the house. In upcoming blog posts, I will share the side patio, backyard and the back patio with the gardens surrounding those areas!

Here is what the front garden beds and the front of the house looked like before:

Now here is a look at the front of the house and the gardens after grading, topsoil, staining the front door and touching up paint.

One of my favorite things about the front flower beds is the patina stone urns filled with flowers. Eventually, the lavender and baby gem boxwoods will grow until they encircle the urns giving it a very European garden design. The evergreens are Degroot Spire Arborvitae and are perfect for the narrow space by the windows as they only grow to be 3-4 ft wide.