Landscaping progress

This weekend I continued work on our little landscape redo. With the hydrangeas planted, I was thinking that I would rip out the overgrown bush in front of the window and possibly plant some blue holly bushes. I didn't quite get to the bush purchasing/planting, however, I did rip out the existing bushes, making for a very clean slate look to our landscape.

Old bushes removed

Here's a shot that shows what it looked like earlier this year:

Before: a view from May of this year

At the time I was considering removing these very bushes.

After that I teetered on going out to purchase the holly bushes as per the design, however, I decided to hold off for now as I'm just not sure about the holly bush idea. The biggest concern I have is the limited space in the area because Blue Holly bushes can grow to over 10 feet tall (if not pruned)! An about.com page on the bush states:

"While it's possible for Blue Princess and Blue Prince holly to top 12' in height at maturity, these shrubs, even with just minimal pruning, are easily kept at a fraction of that height."

So perhaps that fact isn't too big of a deal, but also while browsing at the store one day I noticed that it said to plant them at least 5 feet apart! There is no way I could do that - 3 feet at most, maybe. This random Q&A posting also confirms my fear:

"I planted a blue holly several years ago and now realize that it is too big for the location. I don't want to spend the rest of my days severely pruning this plant back, just to keep it inbounds."

I think I may ask the designer to see what he has to say about this.

So, I decided to move on to something else instead, but I wasn't sure what. The design isn't quite final in my mind, particularly for the front of the house, so I have been struggling with trying to get it to a more finalized state. I decided that it would be helpful for my very visual-aided brain to have the brick edging in place, so I went to work on that and ended up with this:

Brick edging in place

Unfortunately, I was so exhausted from doing this that I never went back to see if that actually helped me visualize anything. I'll have to save that for another day.