It's A Jungle Out There

This is the view from our front door.

And this is the view of our house from the street.

It's probably fair to say that our front garden could be described as a smidge overgrown.

Here's a plan of the driveway:

We've got a huge mass of laurel on the left, space for two cars parked one behind the other, a triangular flower bed hosting hydrangeas, pheasant berry and cypressus, and a monstrous rhododendron that threatens daily to engluf both our house and the neighbours'.

We need to open the space up and make it more functional - specifically we need to park both cars alongside each other. There's actually masses of space, but it's taken up by the crazily jungly plants.

So far, the plan is to chop down the laurel on the left (leaving just enough to retain a hedge between us and next door) thereby extending the driveway to become double the width. This will involve knocking down the brick wall that is currently preventing the laurel from growing with reckless abandon onto the pavement.

We're going to re-size the triangular flower bed (making it smaller) to allow more room for the cars, dig out most of the existing plants, and plant a dwarf cherry tree (we're the only house on the street without a cherry tree, and feel left out).

We're going to keep the rhododendron because it creates privacy for the living room, but we'll cut it back and raise the level of its crown to expose the soil it's growing in, so we can plant bulbs and other flowers below it to create some prettiness. We'll also dig up the existing tarmac driveway and paths, and replace them with sandstone setts.

Quite a task, huh! My parents are coming to stay later this week so I'm planning to let my Dad loose with his hedge cutter and see what happens...