Our transformed front garden

A couple of weeks ago I shared our back garden, and today I'm sharing our front garden transformation! Before it was very boring, just grass which was mainly weeds, always shaded because of the overgrown hedge.

We decided to take some inspiration from a neighbour's recent landscaping and open it all up with a pebbled garden inspired by our local beaches. Although we have removed the old hedge, we have left a marked out bed to replant it later in the year, perhaps with something a little lower in height. The apple tree remains, although it's definitely ready for a good prune this Autumn!

We needed to create a new gate to the other side of the house so we extended the path. The slabs are the same as those that we used in the back garden and they also match the indoor tiles. We added a deep new flower bed in front of each window and have planted those with hydrangeas. I'm trying to keep them blue so I've been using ericaceous compost and fertiliser which is supposed to enhance the blue colour! They are doing really well considering they had no flowers when we planted them a month ago. I'm constantly watering them! I chose blue petunias to match for this year.

We had the garden designed for us which really helped as I wouldn't have known where to start. The landscaper came up with the pebble arrangement and then my designer helped with buying the plants and where to place them. Me and Harry planted them and it was such a difficult job, the ground underneath was really compacted and full of gravel, stones and sand. Luckily despite the poor soil they all seem to be growing well.

We have a mixture of different grasses and also some different types of euphorbia. (I'm not very good with identifying plants!) If the garden opposite is anything to go by, in a few years they will have grown up quite a lot and it will look a little less sparse.

I really like the different mix of colours and textures. I'll be planting some bulbs in the Autumn for next year, and I'm hoping that the hydrangeas will grow to fill the borders.

It makes such a difference to the front of our house and although I do miss some of the privacy that we had from the hedge I've got used to it now. It's nice to be a bit more open, and the front of the house feels much lighter. Now I just need to come up with a plan for the front hedge area.