When we originally cleared the area around the house there were about a dozen large tree stumps (four to six foot diameter) from the old growth forest that was clear cut around the turn of the century. You can see three of them in the before photo. We had most of the ones in the landscaped section of the garden ground down.

One of our design goals was to have as low a maintenance garden as possible while still having some visual appeal. To achieve this we used perennials almost exclusively in the garden design and installed very little grass. It only takes about twenty five minutes to cut the all the grass. For the front yard we chose kinnikinnik as the groundcover.