House Grounds Landscaping: Front Door Landscape and Plant Ideas

Don't settle for the same old landscaping options when you design your front house landscape. Take it to the gardening limit by allowing ivy to scale front walls and roses to climb bare tree trunks. Line the front walkway with boxwoods that provide structure while they showcase eye-catching and colorful flowers.

Clipped Ivy

One way to help your large, imposing home to blend in more with the greenery in your lawn and garden is to bring that greenery right up to the home walls. You can do this with the use of ivy. The ivy vine trumpet creeper (Campsis) easily clings and climbs walls, especially masonry walls.

Grow Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) or Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) ivy if your home is made of wood, as these vines are easier to remove if you ever need to repaint your home. And don't forget, you have to keep the ivy clipped, or trimmed.

Climbing Roses

If your front lawn landscape has a tall pine tree or two in it, which creates a stark landscape look in some areas, you don't have to settle for its distracting presence. You don't have to cut it down, either, in order to make the front of your home more colorful.

Instead, opt for climbing roses to bring an otherwise barren canvas to life. New Dawn roses can wrap their beauty all the way up that pine tree, providing your visitors with color and conversational topics.

Boxwood Lined Walks

Nothing says groomed as well as boxwoods. Using evergreen boxwoods to line your home's walkway adds an air of formality and neatness to the entrance. Double the 'wow' factor by arranging your boxwoods to enclose an area, then plant tulips inside the boxwood enclosure, setting them off by these evergreens.

You can provide complementary color with flowers planted elsewhere in the nearby landscape, or choose tulips that match the exterior of your front entrance.

Boxwoods, broad-leaved evergreens, provide year-round color and little maintenance or insect worries. They don't drop leaves in large numbers at one time, nor are they a weedy plant.

Boxwoods will require protection from winter winds and afternoon sun, though, but the use of larger plants nearby in the landscape design can help minimize both of these potential seasonal problems.

Source
Univ. of Minnesota Extension: Divine Vines
Univ. of Missouri Extension: Selecting Landscape Plants