Foundation Planting—For Real

My Front Yard Starts to Take Shape

My Butchers Broom foundation planting three years later. Worth every minute of digging, chopping, and cussing.

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I was making slow but steady headway on my front yard renovation.

I had drawn up my front yard foundation plan.

I had planted two oak leaf hydrangeas under the right side front windows of the house.

I had taken down the first batch of undead Chinese elms and a few other invasive trees from my front yard.

When I bought the house, the front porch was flanked by two giant Chinese elm tree stumps and fronted by a line of mystery shrubs. The mystery shrubs were in various stages of dying due to neglect and an absence of sunlight.

After I removed the shrubs, and had the stumps ground down, delivery drivers, salespeople, food delivery people—actually, everyone but family members, who knew better—took the removals as a sign that they could walk across the lawn to my front door rather than up the driveway and across the porch like civilized humans.

It was time for a foundation planting intervention.

Selecting Foundation Plants

I decided to focus on the center section of my foundation plan—a 22 ‘ strip bordering  the front porch. To the left of that strip, in front of a stretch of bare wall, I planned to plant a Japanese maple in a raised garden bed. That would provide height, add softness and texture in front of my home’s concrete wall, and clearly designate where the front porch began (and where visitors should walk after parking in the driveway).

To the right of the 22’ strip of yard was the front door. I didn’t want to plant anything directly in front of the door because I wanted it to be easy for guests to see it. But I also wanted to discourage people from walking right up to the door.

I decided to head out front and look at the situation.

And that’s when I remembered The Rocks.

The Foundation Garden Design Challenge

Among the odd assortment of shrubs planted in front of the porch were two rocks. Really big rocks. After Tom the landscaper and his crew cleared out the random shrubs, they left The Rocks where they sat, almost centered in front of the porch.

After a rainy winter, the rocks were semi-buried in mud. I grabbed a pry bar and rolled them out of the mud to clear the way for planting.

These two rocks had been sitting in front of the porch since I bought the house.

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Now I just had to figure out what to do with them. I decided to sleep on the problem. I went back inside to figure out what to plant in my now rock-less foundation plot.

Foundation Plant Criteria

Part of my landscaping plan was to plant a formal flower garden in the front yard. I didn’t want to plant a large foundation garden that would compete with my planned flower garden.

Here’s what I did want:

• A single line of evergreen foundation shrubs that designated the path to the front door.

• Mature size three feet tall and wide to avoid blocking my view of my front yard from my floor-to-ceiling front windows.

• At a mature width of about 3 feet each, I needed seven plants for the 22’ space.

• Non-flowering so that it didn’t compete with the perennials in my future formal flower garden.

• Able to thrive on two hours of direct sun per day.

• Tolerant of the heavy clay soil that stayed soggy during the winter and spring.

I was already dealing with the consequences of lousy yard-related decisions. The last thing I wanted to do was create a new problem for myself.

My list was very specific, but I wanted to get my foundation planting right the first time so I could move on to the other umpteen hot messes in my yard.

I also figured that my super-definitive list would actually be helpful in narrowing down my options.

I was wrong.

I searched online for hours but only found the usual “foundation shrubs for shade” suspects that I did not want. In desperation, I finally visited several of the most comprehensive state extension garden websites to look for my personal plant Holy Grail.

Finally, on https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/, I found it.

Butchers Broom (Ruscus aculeatus) is a slow-growing evergreen Eurasian subshrub (a cross between a shrub and a perennial plant). According to various websites, it will grow in the dark if that’s all you have.

This eccentric little plant ticked every one of my boxes. It took hours to find, but thanks to my super-specific list, I knew it would be exactly what the foundation plot required. I bought it online from an east coast nursery.

Planting Butchers Broom

Five days later, my Butchers Broom plants arrived, healthy and unscathed.

My little plant weirdos. I'd never seen Butcher's Broom before, but I knew immediately that they were exactly what this foundation planting needed.

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They looked completely different from any plant I’d ever seen. The fleshy, dark green stems grew from a center clump. When I removed them from their wrapping, the newer stems stuck out sideways from the center.

Its dark green leaves (which are actually flattened stems called cladodes) were sharp and prickly, and a few had small white flowers growing in the middle. I realized that the prickly leaves would be another deterrent for visitors determined to avoid walking the designated path to my front door.

They were little plant weirdos, and I loved them. They were a perfect solution for my foundation plot—and I liked the idea of providing a home for an overlooked, little-known plant that solved so many problems.

I allowed them to acclimate in a protected part of the backyard for a few days.

My foundation planting plan was absurdly simple—plant them in a line across the front of the porch, leaving space on the left for the Japanese maple and on the right to keep the front door unobscured.

Of course, the weather refused to cooperate with my plans. It rained with a fervor that was unusual even for Portland. It rained so much that my neighbor’s driveway turned into a duck pond—literally.

It rained so much that my neighbor's driveway became a duck pond. Literally.

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A week after the Butchers Broom plants arrived, it stopped raining. I grabbed my new Root Slayer shovel and the plants and headed to the front yard.

I bought this Root Slayer shovel after fighting the Chinese Elm roots in my front planters.

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Rounding the corner, I saw the rocks that I had moved and forgotten about. Dang.

Then it came to me. If I could roll the larger rock to the right hand corner of the porch, I could turn it into something that was actually useful—a gentle reminder to walk across the porch to the front door. And, unlike foundation shrubs, the rock would never grow too tall to block the view of the front door.

After ten minutes of concentrated effort and grunting, I managed to roll the larger rock into place.

Perfect. It was big enough to be a deterrent but not so big that it obscured the front door. And its irregular, solid shape made a nice counterpoint to the house’s vertical lines. A few days later, my neighbor offered to take the other rock off my hands to use in his garden. I gladly obliged.

With the immediate rock problem solved, I measured the available space and set the plants in place on the ground in the spots where I planned to plant them.

I then walked to the center of the front yard and then to the street to double check placement.

Looked right. Time to plant.

The Tree Roots Return

I started planting on the side of the porch closest to where the Japanese Maple would be planted. The Root Slayer shovel ripped through the fibrous roots left by the Chinese elms I had Bob the Tree Guy remove a few months earlier.

The ground was soft from all the rain and easy to dig. I amended the soil in the hole with organic compost and planted my first little plant weirdo.

Then I planted another. At this rate, I would be done in an hour or less.

Famous last words.

On the third hole, I stepped on the shovel tread, drove the shovel into the earth…and almost fell over. My first thought was that I had accidentally hit a water drain pipe or a piece of concrete.

I dropped to my knees and started digging with a hand trowel.

It was a Chinese Elm tree root about three inches in diameter. The ground was full of them. They formed a dense mass 6 inches under the soil. They were still alive and growing despite the fact that the tree they were growing from had been cut down at least a decade before.

Oh, HELL, no. I was not going to let these trees stop me from planting my foundation garden.

I went in my garage and retrieved my hand ax—the one I bought the previous summer for my first assault on the tree roots clogging up the planter beds on the front porch.

For the next three hours, I took back my yard from the Undead Chinese elms.

I dug, chopped, clawed, and cursed. To give the Butchers Broom a fighting chance to get established and compete with the tree roots, I needed to clear a hole three times as large as the first two, then backfill with soil and compost, then plant.

At some point my neighbor must have noticed the crazy person across the street swinging a hand ax into a hole in the ground. My phone chirped with a text message from her.

“Are you alright?”

I texted back. “Yes. Tree roots.”

She responded with a crying emoji.

This was one of the smaller roots I had to chop through to plant the Butcher's Broom.

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On the fifth hole, I paused to take a break. Sitting on my garden stool, I looked at my front yard. Based on the evidence, I was pretty sure that my entire front yard—and probably the backyard, too—was a mass of Chinese elm tree roots.

I grabbed my shovel, walked to the spot where I planned to plant my perennial garden, and started to dig.

Tree roots, six inches under the soil. Masses of them. The legacy of one very bad decision from the previous owners that would take me years—and probably a backhoe—to undo.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to stop and figure out what to do.

I turned to look at the remaining plants. They needed to get in the ground today. Figuring out the rest of the yard would have to wait.

I turned back to the fifth hole, dropped to my knees, and resumed my digging, chopping, and cursing.

A few minutes later, I looked up from my digging and met the eyes of one of the ducks, who had waddled over from the duck pond in my neighbor’s driveway to stand next to me.

“Hi, duck,” I said.

“Quack,” said the duck.

He then turned and waddled back to the pond.

I watched him go and returned to my work. Another hour passed. I finished planting the Butchers Broom, cleaned the mud off my tools, and put them away.

Butchers Broom after planting. The deep shade from the porch overhang is exactly why finding the right plant took so much research.

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After a long hot shower, I sat on my sofa and looked out the window at my seven brave little soldiers, planted among the tree roots, and hoped I had done enough to enable them to thrive.

My thoughts turned to my yard. How was I going to fulfill my dream of beautiful flower gardens when the ground was choked with tree roots?

Establishing a garden is hard work. Undoing four decades of invasive tree growth would be much, much harder.

What made it so bad was that it could have been prevented if the previous owners had simply made one or two reasoned decisions.

The same could be said for at least half of the reno work done in the house.

Every careless decision you make creates work for someone. You can respond with anger, frustration, and another careless decision, or take a minute to calm down and just…think.

I was not going to give up on my vision for my yard. There had to be a way for me to get my flower garden without resorting to a backhoe.

I resolved to sleep on it for as many nights as it took to figure it out. Within reason, of course. Planting season would be here before I knew it.

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Up Next

How to work with your yard's existing landscaping.