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Polite, Pleasing and Potent! Front Yard Design

© Carol Wallace

When we last saw our heroine, she was wrestling with a most unmannerly and boring front yard and an even more unmannerly urge to flout what seems to be the neighborhood conventions for front yard plantings. Having determined that a truly polite garden is one that is safe, subdued, doesn't incite undue envy and isn't likely to disturb the onlooker, she is in a quandary about how to remedy her yard without resorting to the tried, the true and the trite.

She doesn't want to recreate Versailles. She just wants a front yard that expresses something about the people who live inside the house. They aren't exactly like the neighbors, and their house isn't even remotely like any of the others on the block. So the landscaping has to fit the house and its inhabitants, and the peculiar landscaping challenges presented by a very steep front slope that makes most front yard solutions unworkable.

And so, gentle reader, I hope you will not be too dismayed to learn that dwarf golden bamboo will fill the unmowable portions of that slope. Bamboo does tend to disturb people, who have an absolute phobia about it taking over the world. But have no qualms about it taking over in this case, because its perimeter will be mowed regularly. This keeps stray shoots from going out of bounds. Not many people seem to realize that - but they will calm down in a few years when they see exactly how mannerly bamboo that gets mowed can be. And, since it is quite drought tolerant, they will be amazed to see how well it works on a slope.

To complement the bamboo, our heroine is planting a border edged with hakonechloa macra aurea. No one else in the neighborhood grows it; most have probably never heard of it. If they stumble across it at most nurseries they will be shocked at the sticker price, and so will sniff audibly both at its strangeness and its ostentatiousness. But one can edge a garden with it quite affordably if one had the foresight to plant lots of it, found at a bargain price, several years ago and then left it to grow undisturbed.

It is a gorgeous grass, perfect for edging as it grows in a single direction, the way waves crash along the shore. It flourishes in shady areas, is quite drought tolerant when established, and gleams when the wind rustles through it and a stray sunbeam touches it. Perhaps if the neighbors get to know it they will come to love it. And they will be all the richer for expanding their plant vocabularies.