Northeast Gardening: What did you see on your walk?, 1 by DonnieBrook

DonnieBrook wrote:
Very interesting roof on that last one, Al! That must be some neighborhood you walk your dog in!

Victor - isn't it amazing.....the bigger the house, the more mundane the landscaping, it seems! I don't get that. Many of the McMansions here have very trite, repetitive (boring) landscaping. They look a lot like the entrance to a gated community....rows and rows of all the same plants. Or - just the perfunctory green shrubs around the foundation.

We haven't done much yet to the plantings in the front of our house. They are the original ones from 1952 when the house was built. I lived in a house up the street when I was a small kid, while my Dad was building our house a couple streets away. We had the very same ixoras at our house. They were the standard shrub. We have both the orange and yellow flowers on the ixora.

We are growing some cuttings of gumbo limbo trees to put along the sidewalk in front of our house. Their bark is very interesting and the limb configuration is very interesting too. We also want to do some other plantings in the front. We lost a coconut palm and two Royal palms in hurricane Charlie, so that opened the door a bit.

This is a gumbo limbo tree down by the river. (The one with the interesting "branching" trunk........)