Looking Slightly Less Abandoned

Since we bought the house, the front flower bed has looked, well, depressed.  Just a spot for leaves to gather and weeds to grow, except for the three cute little rose bushes [which until I trimmed them and cleaned mounds of leaves from their branches, looked depressed too].  She was easy to ignore, and kinda bummed out the rest of the entry with her sad sighs.

But now it's May!  Flowers are budding, the sun is out [so are my blindingly pale legs] and it's time I did something to cheer up the little flower bed.

Here she is before, collecting leaves, as usual:

 So I got some pretty perennial plants at Lowes.  Something that is a mounding plant for between the rose bushes, and a ground cover to disguise the weeds that will inevitably come up [and that I will inevitably always forget to pull].  I went with Alium, or German Garlic, that has a pretty silvery leaf, and purple flowers that I can. not. wait. to. see.

 And another silvery leafed ground cover, which I chose because it has a funny name.

I dug up a ton of weeds, pulled up that landscaping fabric [that stuff never works! and this just looked messy], plopped in the new plants, added pretty cypress mulch* and now she looks a little more loved:

Close to the porch, there's a big empty spot.  Eventually I'll pick a nice evergreen shrub, and get two, so I can plant one on the other side of the patio [symmetry ftw!].  But that's more of an intense decision-making process; I can't just go picking one that makes me giggle.  So more on that later. But it'll looks something like this:

And, assuming I don't kill all of the plants, I'll post pics when things flesh out, and if I see those pretty purple flower clusters!  And I gotta decide what to do with that awkward gap between the stone patio and the landscape edging that's *really* in there.  I'll keep you updated on that too :)

*it's not all cypress mulch, actually.  I bought one bag of cedar mulch at Lowes, got home, saw that I had grossly underestimated how much I needed, and this morning went to our local Ace for some more, since it's the closest.  They only carry cypress.  So it's a mixture of cedar and cypress, but it all looks the same, and I couldn't really care less.