Hi everyone, I always come to this forum and others to draw inspiration for my yard. I thought I'd share a bit of my progress with you all. This space is four years in the making. The first couple of years was spent just removing overgrown hedge bushes and a lawn of bermuda grass. It wasn't until about year two that I started planting young palms up front and small cuttings of succulents which would later fill and and provide me with more cutting material for new plants.

Here's what we started with in 2013. Pretty much everything in this picture was removed - the lawn, the hedges, a diseased liquidambar tree and ash tree (out of the frame). The trees in the back remain though.

This is a shot from this morning. I like the idea of emphasizing the sunburst of the house by creating some symmetry in the yard - though not perfect symmetry. The palms on each side of the walkway will provide the structure for the yard as they mature and emphasize the symmetry even if the plantings underneath them change. The succulent plantings on one side mimic the plantings on the other side, though the plant material is somewhat different. The door is not perfectly centered, so I used a large pot to the left of it to fill the negative space between it and the left window - somewhat creating a balanced look.

The palms closest to the walkway in the back near the porch are phoenix reclinata (which I'll prune to keep single trunked), then as you move left and right on each side, there are syagrus 'abreojos' that will frame the pitched roof of the porch on either side. These will grow faster and taller than the phoenix reclinata. And further to the left and right of those are two phoenix rupicola - one on each side.

I continue to play around with the front of the plant bed - moving things, adding succulents, taking cuttings to reproduce what I already have, but I think the basic structure of the yard is pretty much complete. And as you can tell from the picture, I'm still battling some of the bermuda grass coming up in the walkway. I am thinking of re-pouring the front walkway and making large, rectangular stepping blocks up the the front door. If I ever do this, I guess I can care of the straggling pieces of bermuda grass then.