More pictures will be needed. If you will draw, to scale and with measurements, the exterior outline of your house identifying the front doors -- front and back and garage and patio -- and let us know how large your lot is -- how much room you have including from house to road and from side of lot to side of lot -- that would help a lot.

Do you have any pictures from slightly further back?

An 18” wide planting bed is nearly useless for real plants, especially in a hot dry area. (I guess you could plant small succulents.)

And yeah, we can’t make heads nor tails of these pictures. A simple to-scale sketch showing the outside lines of the house, driveway, and sidewalk would be lots more helpful.

You can always plant things later but you need a walkway from your entry door to the driveway and some feature that says HERE this is the way to my main entry door.

Save as much of a planting area as possible between house and driveway -- the full 18" -- and keep your options open for later.

Consider having your walkway begin at the road and create it by creating a driveway several feet wider than necessary and adding a PATTERN to those several feet of extra width of concrete to create your sidewalk while leaving your actual driveway plain concrete.

DO make sure your driveway turns rainwater AWAY from your house back toward the road and if it doesn't appear to do so, you may need to create a curb at the driveway side of your planting area and a French Drain alongside your driveway to turn water back toward the road.

Since zones snake across the country knowing the nearest big city would help.

tj

yakima, washington

The gray house is what we tore down...and yes, it was a mobile home plopped on a concrete pad!!!

i would cement the 18 inches... make the walkway get wide enough at the door for ease of use.. and do the gardening [if any] on the side of the sidewalk away from the house ...

there is little or nothing you can grow in 18 inches.. that will have much of any impact ...

besides... isnt the river the focus of the house.. the entryway should be simply utilitarian ... just get in the house.. and look out the back windows..

ken

I thought maybe the gray house was a neighbor with a similar lot. You can use different materials like this example for the sidewalk along the house. Although the sidewalk is next to the driveway, it signifies a difference.

Ranch House Driveway and Front Entry Paving installation · More Info

Thank you!!

Eighteen inches is certainly minimal for a planting bed... if you could figure out a way to do 24", that would open up more planting possibilities. It seems like you'd otherwise have a large expanse of concrete from the driveway and just extending that all the way up the side of the house to the front door seems unappealing and also HOT! I'm wondering whether, instead of a solid concrete pathway, something like poured in place pavers might be a good solution. They would help define the walkway to your front door much better than an extension of the driveway concrete would. For your application, you might want to just do a series of same-size rectangles instead of pavers of different sizes, but this photo gives an idea. The grasses shown (looks like blue fescue to me) would fit in your 18" planting bed and don't require a lot of water - there are quite a few small grasses that would work in the Yakima area. You could even go with artificial (!) if you're worried about putting any water near your foundation. You could also do planting between the pavers rather than river rock in order to get some green into the area, but that can be more difficult to maintain in an area that gets a lot of foot traffic.

Del Mar Beach Modern · More Info

i would pave the whole thing and add large pots of plants or tall narrow planters where they fit. Consider setting them on the ”river” side of the walkway so that the view as one approaches the house isn’t solely of masonry. As others have said, 18” is an unusable planting space, especially when sandwiched between one stone-faced wall and a concrete walkway because it will get hot during the day and stay hot all night as the masonry gives off heat. I agree that having the walkway of a different material than the driveway will make it clear where the approach to the door is. Siting of pots can help that as well.