Here a Tree, There a Tree

What do you do when you enjoy the beauty of landscapes, flowers and trees yet do not enjoy the labor and planning that goes into it all?
You thank your lucky stars that you married a Landscape Architect.
My husband, Chad, is a Landscape Architect who is very talented at designing (and even installing if he gets the opportunity, which is rare) landscape plans. Right now he works at an architecture firm and mostly does plans for public schools. However, our collective dream is to one day have enough resources to make the outside of our home as beautiful as those that grace his imagination.
(When he reads this he is going to be mad at me for complimenting him on the internet! Oh well...I'll take the risk!)

When we bought the house we had some landscape features that we weren't too crazy about. There were some bushes along our front porch that weren't exactly our style and also hid the front porch more than we would've liked. Also there was a lilac bush with wisteria growing in it that was beautiful when it bloomed (I saw it the first time I looked at the house with the realtor) but when it wasn't in bloom it was just horrid looking. There was also a HUGE tree too close to our house that Chad insisted was dead. He is also a Certified Arborist, so I guess I had to believe him! What it boiled down to is that we wanted to remove it all.
So in the beginning of last summer, that is exactly what Chad did.
Removing all of the bushes and anything in our yard was the first major project that was tackled as well as burying all of the downspouts. It was a good project to start with as we got to know many of our neighbors. Most of them complaining to Chad that he was making them all look bad!
Chad tore out the bushes in the front yard and the lilac bush by himself. Luckily for us, the huge tree that was in our yard was actually on the city's property and they removed it for us.
Before removal.
After removal.

The city has also came and ground the stump which makes our yard look much better. Just to be perfectly clear here, we are certainly not in favor of chopping down trees - only dead ones that pose a possible threat to your property.
As you can imagine the removal of everything in the yard left many blank spaces. Chad loves trees and considers them the pillars of a good landscape plan. So buying and planting trees was a natural start for us.
Since last summer we have bought and Chad has planted -
three crabapple trees in the front yard, here they are in bloom this spring:


a dogwood in the back yard:


an ironwood in the side yard by our garage:


a blue spruce (sorry - this is not a great picture):


and we just bought three new trees (I can't remember the name of these) to plant near where the old, huge tree used to be:


For the moment that is going to be it for the trees (I think!) The only landscape feature we plan on doing soon, hopefully this summer, is adding a fence to the back yard.
Since I have probably bored everyone to death talking about trees, I'm going to end this post.