I have to say, I really enjoy this part of the show. Its where you send photographs in of your property. We plan a list of ideas about how to improve landscape. Today we’re taking a look at Bonne’s house in Michigan.

Now what we have here is a very long traditional style house. Now what I think I’d like to do with the landscape just to change and start with maybe taking down this shrubs because there just a little tall and it looks to me like you enter on this side and come in behind the brick wall or actually looks like a stone wall that you can sit under the porch. So want to bring these shrubs down just a little bit Bonne because they’re too tall.

Then what I would like to do, given the fact that we’ve got this long horizontal line like this. I’d like to break that up a little bit. So why don’t we explore what might go kind of in these are which might screen a little bit of a garage door and imbalance it maybe here on this side, alright?

So just to raise those lines and we’ll get started. I think that what would be really beautiful here since you’re in Michigan you do so well with those gorgeous white birch. So what I’m thinking if we did some birch trees, a cluster of maybe three multi-trunk birch on the corner. We create almost kind of an arbor-like effect going into this walkway around into the front. Well I would try to kind of counter balance that over here somehow with maybe another grove of birch like this and then what we might do is under plant those birch with rhododendron.

You do so well with those rhododendrons and a gorgeous white rhododendron under both of these clumps of birch would be fantastic, alright. Now if you’re really into Perennials and your in a great part of the world to into Perennials Michigan, you can grow almost anything and I see you over here on the right hand side, you have some—what I would suggest is that bring out, your going to have a bed that’s going to come around the edge here. I expand this bed, let the bed come around here and then come back and broaden this, I'm going to broaden it over. Take some of that along and bring it around, alright.

Now with that in place, lets go back to this color. I would punctuate the front of this bed with an evergreen shrub like this, it looks like this might be used. So we might put another one here, another one here, another one here, another one here and then on the front create a rhythm of an evergreen like that in between. Then I would come back and fill in here with a ground cover, alright.

Punctuating with that ground cover, or punctuating the ground cover I should say. I would add some big clumps of hosta and then on this side, I would add hosta here with ground cover across the front of the rhododendron and then in this bed, I can see you have—what a gorgeous, gorgeous spring or early summer flower. I would add some other Perennials that would give you some visual interest through out the growing season, particularly late in the season.

So we’ve talked about using white rhododendrons, your house is going to have beautiful lavender white blooms, what if we went to the theme that kind of work with the color of the house here where we use gray Foliage plants. Plants like Russian sage, lamsere, maybe even some platy codner, the balloon flower, some purple cone flower, all in here, working around your—and I’d even add some more of those—because that’s a Perennial that’s hard to beat.

As you can see Bonne, your adding by adding all of these beautiful flowers can only get better from here, I hope this helps.

Would you like to see your home featured in a make over like you saw in the last segment, if so just go to PAlenSmith.com/virtualMakeOver and send me a photograph of your house. If your house is selected, it will be featured in the future episode of my public television series P. Alen Smith Garden Home, distributed by American public television. Also on my website you will find great tips on gardening recipes and and videos. Just check out PAlenSmith.com.