landscaping is hard to do...

We were provided the initial plans for the landscaping this afternoon and I must admit, Michael Ann who has worked with Tom for many years, listened to what we told her and really delivered!  She has a very tough job - our corner lot is quite large and the house was built within the easement restrictions of the property leaving the lot with essentially two front yards. 

Our main goal was low maintenance and a wonderful place for McKinney, our labradoodle, to enjoy!  And, I wanted a much larger, formal koi pond!  And, we did not require modern, contemporary landscaping design.

There are a lot of folks that would question why we built a modern home if we were just going to turn it into a transitional home?  Short and sweet...we love modern but we also love carrara and knock out roses. 

You are going to have to take my word for it that Michael Ann provided lovely, easy to read drawings of the landscape design.  Using my iphone to try and take a good, readable picture of the plans is almost laughable...but I thought that having something to look at was better than nothing. 

I already know that mom is going to get frustrated because she just can't see it real good...  Mom, I can't see it real good in these pictures either.  I tried to at least provide a couple of descriptions in one of the picture so that you can kind of try to envision the rest from there.

You will see that McKinney has a nice sized back yard which will basically be grass and fence - nothing special required there...remember, we have to think about budget too.  The backyard space will be larger than our current backyard - and instead of one door leading outside, McKinney has his pick of 3 different sliding glass doors.  We, of course, will have to open the doors for him - but that is ok since we have never been big fans of doggie doors.  McKinney is quite a lot bigger than most labradoodles, so his doggie door would allow just about any human to enter the house as well.  You will also see that we have two front yards.  And, in frontyard 2, right off the front courtyard (the sliding doors facing Thornberry in the dining area) is a wonderful deck and the location of my awesome formal, koi pond (1200 gallons of healthy, beautiful pond)!

Here is the key - just to frustrate you as you try to match up the little plants from the key with the landscape drawing.

Ok...now that you are equipped with a key, here is the entire landscape.  Notice that I tried to give you an idea of where the house is and the front door - that is all I can do unfortunately...  Better than nothing, though!

 And here is a "close up" of the deck and the front courtyard area...the spot of my koi pond.

Wow...that isn't very much better than the first image.  But that little rectangular spec right off the wood deck is the koi pond.  I am going to ask her to make it quite a bit larger and 1 more foot deep - the pond will be partially below ground.  The ledge of the pond on the deck side which will be above ground will also serve as a bench on the deck.  Pretty clever, huh?

Now good luck trying to figure out what each of the plants are...hint, the 6 circles lining the right are double knock out roses.