Longview
Longview
A short, friendly orientation for the upcoming months in your yard.
Welcome to the neighborhood. I'm Andrew — a landscape designer based here in PG County, and the founder of Longview Landscape Design.
The new-house yard is a strange thing. It came with the house. You didn't really pick it. You might have gotten a home inspection, but no one handed you a manual about how to take care of the landscape. Most of what's written online about gardening assumes you already have a project in mind, which you might not (and that's okay!).
This page is a soft landing — not a how-to guide. Here's the most useful thing I can tell you: your first months are for noticing, not for giant projects.
Almost every regret I see in new-homeowner yards comes from acting too fast. A bed someone ripped out in March turns out to have had spring ephemerals worth keeping. A "scraggly" shrub in July turns out to be the only thing flowering in November. A tree someone took down was the one keeping the kitchen cool in August.
Yards have stories that take a while to read. Walk yours often! Take photos of the same spot every month. Download an app called "Lumos" to see how the sun tracks across the sky. By the time you've seen a few seasons, you'll know far more about what you have — and therefore what to do.
None of these will cost you anything to undo later — that's the criterion.
If you see mulch piled into a cone or volcano shape against a tree's trunk, drag it back so the flare of the trunk meets bare soil as best you can. Ten minutes with a rake or your hands. Mulch volcanoes are one of the most common silent killers of suburban trees — they rot the bark and suffocate the roots.
Work gently, and you can't make a mistake doing this. Sometimes landscapers apply fresh mulch multiple times a year to make it seem as if they've "done something" — but that's often overkill for trees.
Walk the yard with your phone and an app like Seek, PlantNet, or iNaturalist. Look especially for English ivy, Japanese honeysuckle, porcelain berry, garlic mustard, multiflora rose, and tree of heaven. Photograph each one. You don't need to do anything about them this month, but knowing what's there is a head start on the only project that's almost always worth doing.
(Pulling invasives in the wrong season can spread them and make the problem worse long term. Timing matters depending on the species; there are guides online or we can talk through it.)
Take a photo from the exact same spots on the first weekend of every month at least through the growing season. Doesn't need to be artful — on your phone, at roughly the same time of day, done in 30 seconds.
By month twelve you'll have a record of what your yard actually does across a year. You'll see things you'd never notice otherwise — what blooms when, where the morning sun reaches in February vs July, when the leaves drop.
Going to a big-box nursery and buying whatever's blooming. The plants on display in June are not the plants your yard needs in June — they're the plants that sell in June. You'll spend a few hundred dollars and a lot of them will struggle with the summer heat.
Pulling a "weed" before knowing what it is. The thing you think is a weed might be the previous owner's favorite native plant. Or vice versa!
Hiring a lawn-care service to "clean things up." There are great services out there (I can recommend some!), but a lot of lawn-care crews will spray, mow, and edge everything to a generic suburban template. Wait until you have a plan, save your money, and then get what you really want.
Buying mulch by the truckload to "make it look finished." Mulch is great in measured amounts. Mulch as a coverup for "I don't know what to do here yet" tends to look not so great a few months from now, and (depending on the mulch) doesn't feed the soil life that makes a future garden beautiful.
I don't recommend rushing into a project — but when you do feel like you want a second opinion in person, here are the two cleanest places to start. Both come with a written deliverable you keep forever.