New here - big identification project! Need lots of help...

[Andrew]

Hi all,

New here, and I really need some help with identifying plants around our home.

Long story short: we've live here (Southern NJ) for about 15 years now. A landscaper put a bunch of stuff in when we got here, but I don't remember what most of it is/was and we have added here and there.

My process:
1) Try to identify everything
2) Move some things depending on care/sunlight
3) redesign and add landscaping

Now, this doesn't include the yard - that's a whole other thing. But I've drawn a plan and linked pretty much everything (save for a few larger trees).

So, if you have a chance, please have a look. I know it's a big project but I can't think of a better way than asking people who know what they're doing

Here's the plan I drew with clickable plants - http://home.comcast.net/~turner410/yard/

(sorry about that link - got a message saying new members can't post urls...[Mod edit: fixed it for you!]

Thanks in advance for any help/identification/suggestions you may have!

cheers,
Andrew

 

[thistlebloom]

Welcome to the forum Andrew!
That was a fun tour of your yard, and here's a few ID's I came up with:
1. Like you said, it's a grass, but since there are about 1.6 bajillion of them, and I'm not real good at telling what some of them are, I'll pass on this one.
2. Daylily
3. Same
4. Same
5. grass
6. Iris
7. Spruce
8. Iris
9 & 10 & 11. grass
12. Looks like a fir seedling. Was it planted on purpose, or is it a volunteer?
13. Azalea
14. rhodie
15. & 16. Boxwood
17.Euonymus( probably "japonicus")
19. Eouynomus alata "Burning Bush"
20. cherry
21. cherry laurel (?)
22. laurel (?) Otto Luken (?)
23. hmmm
24. cherry
25. looks like sea oats
26. BIG grass!
27. azalea like you said, no idea on the weed.
28. Yeah, pear, and you should get an arborist in there to assess the best options, the interior branching is really congested, with sharp angles on the branches. Unfortunately, Bradfords are notoriously brittle, so it will be prone to a lot more breakage.
You could also lift the canopy by pruning those really low branches over your deck.
29. Spirea
30. Looks like a honeysuckle in your roses, but I'm not sure of that
31.
32.Hydrangea
33. I should know this, it's not jumping up into the open tho'. Agapanthus maybe?
34.Blue fescue.Finally! A grass I know!
35 umm, grass
36.Lily, oriental or asiatic.
37. By all means, pull the ivy up and replant. Easy-peasy!
not guessin' on the doo!

Hopefully others will jump in and undo my mistakes!
That was fun!

 

[wsmoak]

No idea on most of them (green plant!) but what did you use to make the diagram? -Wendy

 

[digitS']

It was a fun tour, Andrew. Welcome ! How'd you do the clickable landscape? Oh, that's okay . . .

I'm glad Thistle' got here first with such an amazing list!

Now. You have questions about changes to your landscape . . . I can't help you there either! I'm terrible about such creative things :/!

I'll just point at something that I know makes a big difference: north. Your front yard is on the north side of your home. The backyard and your deck gets lots of sun!

Okay, that was too easy but I'm waaay 2-dimensional for landscape ideas, a bare soil/annual garden kind of guy . . .

Steve

 

[Andrew]

WOW! This is super helpful. You are a great crowd.

To answer your questions and add a few notes:

thistlebloom:

1) the "grass" listings are cracking me up. I'm a bit tired so when I got to 35 I just started laughing...

2) Fir seedling (?) Volunteer.. must have blown over from somewhere. I guess it didn't come from the spruce.

3) Boxwoods... aha! Maybe that explains all the boxelder bugs we get?

4) 21... whoops, I'll fix that

5) I'll get someone to look at that tree.

6) Ivy: great!

Hi Wendy:

I just did this real quickly in Adobe Illustrator. The property lines were based on a hand-drawn survey we got from the realtor when we bought our house; the house is based on CAD plans I made from the original blueprint given to us by the township when we bought the house, and the deck was also done in CAD when I build it about 11 years ago, and just imported. So, it's pretty accurate. This was just the easiest way to bring everything together!

Steve:

Thanks for the welcome. The clickable landscape is a JPEG to which I added the clickable regions and links to other pages. I used Adobe Dreamweaver. If you do a search for "image hotspots" you're bound to find a decent description of how to do them. That said, you still have to create pages for each link!

Thanks again all... I haven't even begun asking about my weed museum of a lawn yet...

Andrew

 

[vfem]

I thought it was adobe done! Hahaha... been quite a few years since I've used it, but I still mess with flash & photoshop some (being that its CS, I'm out of date).

I like what you're doing, its a good plan. I do see you have lots of grasses, but they are good hardy green ones that will last a good amount of time. They'll also take the move well I think.

I enjoyed your pictures as well, and I think the list you got now is probably as close as you're going to get without a horticultural expert in person. So that is actually REALLY awesome!

So you're going to do this all yourself?! WAY TO GO!

I hope you come back and share with us while you're working on it, its always nice to meet new people and share in their experience. I think we live for this stuff.

 

[journey11]

Hello Andrew and !

Really cool interactive diagram. I had fun poking around on it. Gotta love Adobe! I used to have a full version of Photoshop, but went ahead and downsized to Elements because that was all I needed for daily use.

We'll be eager to see the final results of your landscape project!

 

[Andrew]

Thanks for the link fix, Reinbeau!

Also, the main image for link 21 is fixed.

 

[annageckos]

I, personally, would kill that ivy. It is EVIL. It will kill trees and other plants. One house I lived in it was growing into the basement and clogged up the pipes. It also was pulling the mortar out from between the bricks of a chimney.

 

[thistlebloom]

Lots of plants can be invasive and destructive. The trick is knowing ahead of time what their habits are and gearing up to deal with them.