The House With No Landscaping

My Ugly Florida Yard

I am not sure how a 20-year old house located in a nice neighborhood with a HOA managed to get by without any significant landscaping being added to the property, but this one did.

My husband bought the house 6 years ago thinking he was getting a reasonably attractive front yard with new sod, a block border creating the appearance of a flower bed in front of the house and a few non-descript shrubs.

Within days of moving into the house he noticed the grass was dying. Close inspection made it obvious the new sod was just "window dressing" to make the house sell faster. The soil underneath had not been prepped at all, so he ended up having to remove the sod leaving him with a bare front yard.

His budget did not allow him to hire a landscaper, and he is not one, so he set out to at least have a covering of turf by sowing centipede grass seed...also on unprepped soil. The grass grew, but it has never been lush or hardy. It has become a habitat shared with a wide assortment of weeds.

Constant visits by moles soon made the block border become uneven, so it eventually needed to be removed. The remaining shrubs were not attractive and obviously not properly selected to be planted close to the house. They had to be removed before they outgrew the space and compromised the siding. One small lone photinia was planted at one corner of the house within inches of the siding, which is ridiculous since they can easily grow to be 20 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter.  It was goodbye, photinia!

The side yard & the back yard had never had ANY landscaping. The backyard was packed with a layer of live oak leaves at least six inches deep that was a mushy mess when he dug beneath the very top layer. Week after week there were five large garbage cans put out as yard waste. Two large oak trees that had been struck by lightening were rotting from the inside and had to be removed. 

Let's get back to the front yard, since the entire yard is way too much to write about in a single posting.

During tropical storm Fay, water backed up against the slab foundation. My husband discovered it just before it got high enough to flood the interior of the house. Removing a few of the blocks from the flower bed wall did not allow water to spill out because the ground was uneven creating a pond effect. This was a close call for some serious water damage.

I entered the picture in March of 2011, and I am a woman on a mission! The yard pictured above is what I have to work with as I begin turning it into a serene oasis in sunny Florida.