Landscaping the homestead

One of the reasons why I have taken refuge from regular blogging has been the my efforts to spruce up my front lawn. When I first moved into my subdivision, I was too busy being concerned about holding onto my job at the time, so I took the approach of trying to comply with the landscaping requirements in my neighborhood using the minimal amount of effort and money. I was required to plant some evergreens in the front yard, and did so, to a varying degree of success. 2 of the larger evergreens died over winter, and I had to replace them earlier in the spring. After having my house on the market for a few months, I realized that improving the curb appeal was important, so I decided to introduce landscaping rocks and a border to it. As it turned out, it was not a very attractive move. Here is how it looked in May, with the landscaping rocks: When the dog days of August arrived, and after I took my house off the market for a variety of personal reasons, I decided a clean-sheet approach was needed. I had already a backlog of plants sitting in my yard, waiting to be planted, but there was no obvious place for them. A couple of trees, including a poodle evergreen you see in both images, were dying. So, I quickly hustled over to the hardware store and returned the trees, and got new ones. I also decided to re-do the edging on the yard, and found this amazing easy-to-use edging that did not require too much effort or digging. I was successfully able to lay out the edging according to the image in my mind early last week. With some advice and input from some friends, I spent the next 7 days tweaking the yard, and the edging. Among the many things I did was to get some mums to brighten up the landscape, experimenting with 3 kinds of mulch, locating and carrying home some decent landscape rocks from a nearby place, and moving around some existing trees (some of which have been standing around since last year--unplanted)to come up with this: In less than 2 weeks' time, I have successfully transformed a pretty mediocre attempt to be 'cute' with riverbed pebbles and indifferent edging, to just going all out on making the yard look as if someone had put some thought and planning into it. Now, I feel pretty good about getting this house on sale, when the time comes for me to move, which should be sooner than you'd think. Tell me what you think of the effort.