Clearing A Path To The Front Door

Let us do the path (I am not good at math, but digging up a path, I can do). And John’s good at both. Overachiever, much? Anyway, this is simply a photo from before we began working on the garden beds on either side of the porch (more on that here and here) so you can see how that clump of bushes in front of the porch was kind of weird and reversed. Do not you think plants on either side of the porch would look pleasant and balanced while the path to the door and the porch should be more open and airy instead of crowded by overgrown boxwoods? It was like things were backwards. Business in the middle instead of business on the sides. It was a bush mohawk.

And when a certified landscape expert (more on that here) confirmed that those boxwoods were on their last legs anyway due to some bare spots and diseased tops, we were even more sure we had to open things up so the path to the door felt less crowded (do not worry, we still tried to transplant as many as we could to see if they’ll make it in a less in-yo-face location).

See what we mean? On moving day we dragged things down this path approximately 5,000 times with the bushes reaching out and grabbing us the whole time.

They simply do not have any understanding of personal space. We in fact learned from our little landscaping consultation that pathways are ideally four feet wide so two people can walk next to each other or carry large items without getting bush-groped. So the least we can do is make this path feel as wide as possible by opening things up.

Operation Clear The Path began with us digging out the azaleas that were fully crowding the porch (their base was literally simply inches from the brick side of the porch). That garden bed is compact, and no place for large bushes like that. They were not too bad to dig up since the ground was wet from rain the day before – and we transplanted them on the side yard that we are trying to naturalize so it’ll have some fairly pops of color down there and they will not be nearly as cramped.

Next it was time to dig up those boxwoods along the other side of the path. They were a bit more challenging to get up, but again thanks to moist soil from previous rain, it was not too bad. It likely took about fifteen to twenty minutes per bush and there were eight of them, so this was an nearly three hour process done over two Clara naps. A few of the bushes were too far gone so we simply cut them out with the reciprocating saw and then dug up their roots since that was easier if there was no saving them.

But the ones that looked like they might stand a fighting chance of survival also got transplanted in the side lot near the azaleas.

Then it was time to do something we will likely be doing until the end of time at this house. Digging up more of that ubiquitous liriope that abounds. This stuff was in fact growing up and over the pavers – making the path look a foot narrower thanks to at least six inches of encroachment on each side. See the root system of the one below in fact covering half of that paver?

We knew digging them out would widen the path again (no more bushes or grasses trying to tickle people’s legs as they walked by), but we truly were not expecting simply how much of a difference clearing out this small bed that once housed giant azaleas and endless monkey grass would make. The porch could at last breath again!

We went ahead and mulched it all the way down, simply to keep weeds from springing up all willy-nilly, but we do plan to plant some small fairly flowering perennials or annuals eventually. Simply holding out to find some we truly like that will do well in such a narrow spot (we are sure there are a ton of options, so we will simply see what we like and resist the urge to try to settle too swiftly on something “meh”).

And we cannot even explain how much of a difference it made to clear out those big clumpey and crowded boxwoods that were on the other side of the path. Are you ready for the biggest landscaping difference we have seen this spring? Check out the path before we cleared it out…

… and after:

Does not the path itself look about twice as wide and a lot more open? Do not your eyes travel to fairly things, like the woods beyond the path, and the open and much more welcoming porch? We have plans to seed the whole left side of the path so that grass simply comes right up to it (nothing big will pen you in, so the path will look pleasant and wide and welcoming). We have a ton of other areas to garden around the perimeter of the house, so we will appreciate simply having to mow that strip of land instead of needing to plant/mulch/prune/weed another bed. So picture that big patch of brown as green as the grass beyond it. Can you see it?

And here is the difference from the other side. Before:

And after:

And now for some shots from a bit further away for ya. First here is how this angle looked back when we moved into our house (what house?):

And here are how things are looking these days:

Of course we still have about 679 other things on our exterior to-do list (see more of that here) but we are inching towards something that looks a whole lot better than what we began with.

Ah landscaping, you take a while and make our arms and back ache, but you are worth it.

As for how long clearing the path took in total, the whole project – including the time it took to transplant things in other areas – was around 8 hours. We began it about a week ago, which is why we could not show wide shots of the garden beds on each side of the porch (since that path was torn up/in progress – and we hoped to get ‘er done before taking pics from further away). That last shot from the street deflates us further emphasizes how much more we still have to tackle, but it is certainly pleasant to look at the before pic to remember how far we have come in the time that we have been here. Slowly, but surely.

What are you folks doing when it comes to the path to your front door? Is it open and clear, packed with flowering plants? Full of overgrown bushes you are planning to relocate as well? Tell $herdog all about it.