New Home, New Garden: Starting my Front Yard Garden from Scratch

🌿 Welcome to The Homebody’s Garden 🌿

In this first episode, I’m starting from scratch—new home, blank yard, and big garden dreams. Come along as I begin transforming my front yard. I’m a self-taught gardener learning by trial and error, so come learn with me!

✨ If you’re into cozy gardens, thoughtful design, and finding peace in the process—you’re in the right place.

In this video:
• My initial front yard layout + before shots
• My favorite plants (and why)
• Planting the finishing touches

📍 USDA Zone 7 | Part sun, full sun areas
🪴 Garden style: Contemporary cottage with a secret garden feel

🔔 Subscribe to follow the transformation as I grow this garden one season at a time.

come on Slowpoke come on Mr kim come on come here right here all right good boy all right turn around smile pretty and say “Welcome to the homebody’s garden.” Yeah good boy hey y’all my name is Brantley and I’m so excited that you’re here with me in the homebody’s garden uh this is my first video on the channel and today not only do I want to walk you through the garden as it is today but I want to show you how it’s evolved over the last couple of years i am a self-taught gardener here in zone 7 in Maryland and I garden on a small urban lot about 5,500 square ft when we moved into this house a couple of years ago there wasn’t much in the yard at all as you’ll see later so I basically started from scratch and had no garden experience so everything that I’ve learned has been mostly through trial and error so today I want to show you how in the past 2 years I’ve taken the garden from looking like this to [Music] this but first uh I’ve got a few plants that need to be planted so why don’t you come with me as I put the finishing touches on the front yard so here are the plants that we’re going to be planting today uh I’ll start with this ground cover rose which is the first time I’ve done a ground cover rose um roses are kind of my new obsession this year uh this is sweet drift uh just drift rose i believe they get Yeah one and 1/2 ft high by 2 and 1/2 ft wide so this is going to go in a corner spot in the front and I am really really excited for what it’s going to look like there i think it’s going to fill that space out perfectly this guy right here I think it’s pronounced GM um this is my first time growing one of these guys this is the Pedicote Peach GM these cone flour I bought these last year and just didn’t get them in the ground um this is the coneflower pow-wow wild berry they are native here in our area they get about 2 feet high and a little over one foot wide last but certainly not least I am so excited for this Woolerton Old Hall David Austin rose got its first little bloom right there starting to come up ready to plant Luga let’s plant [Music] this is a uh GM is that how you pronounce it i don’t know gu oh yeah it’s new for me i know i When I saw it I was like I need some some peach and apricot colors in here and I think it boom balls yeah spring to fall excellent [Music] i think I’m going to trim it [Music] okay so I also feel like I have way too much purple in this well I shouldn’t say I have too much purple because can you really have too much purple so I think flanking this side of the yard with too pink plant it’s going to be nice [Music] something [Music] [Music] i only planted it like maybe a week or two ago yeah here we go oh yeah that easy all right i want it to kind of come up right here between the grass and the lemon lime nandina and if you think I’m planting things too close together and know that I’m planting things very close together but it’s because I have a young garden and I want things to look dense i don’t want to wait 5 years for that so here is our miss lemonilia i love this plant i love the foliage i loved it it also gets like these really pretty little white flowers and it has a more of like a spreading habit even though I do think it gets like maybe two to three feet tall oh bio and I think this is going to do much better here it’s going to have a lot more room to grow that root ball was kind of tiny i bought this plant last year and it just never seemed to really take off i believe this plant’s also evergreen all right so the next musical chairs we’re going to play last year I planted these after dark sedum i actually planted four up here this one and this one right here you can see it it’s a little greener than that those were the only two that came back so I’m going to move this over here and make it a little sedum collection here in the front so again I’m trying to be careful not to disturb these tulips because I really want them to come back next year i’ll show you a picture of what they look like earlier this year oh my goodness i am already loving this here so this is going to stay a little bit low it’s not going to get taller than anything behind it i think it’s going to be just a beautiful contrasting color here with this tiny wine nine bark which has a darker foliage and as you see has light pink blooms right now in spring it’s going to be between these two east freezeland salvia obviously all these tulips will not be here soon and I think just being in front of the Carly Rose grass the ornamental grass with the little pink plumes on top and I just think it looks better here with this lemon lime nine i know they’re similar but um just kind of with the sun shining on it like this it just looks like it’s lit up and I love that and here is the duff rose and the other salvia that I planted with it so we are making progress so this little area is where we’re going to plant our coneflower today look really nice in front of the wila as well because that’s going to go out of bloom here in a little while and this cone flour pow-wow wild berry is going to pick up the blooms for summer oh nope so this is a little bit too close to that sunshine lustrum we’re going to have to move you over mister there is a bulb so I mixed in a little bit of compost little biotone and a little bit of the native soil aren’t these just the cutest love their branding okay so my understanding is this little stem position the rose with the base of the stems 2 in below the top of the hole i’m going to cut that off okay so base of the stem 2 in below i think this is right move it over just a bit yeah believe this is right but hey if it’s not you can correct me nicely in the comments again I’m selftaught so I could come back next year and tell you I did it wrong it died don’t copy me and I’m going to come back through here and fill in top dress with some compost to hide this lovely red clay soil you would have told me last year that at this point I would already have six rose bushes planted in my garden this year I would not have believed you because last year I didn’t like roses and this year I love them i’m not sneezing i’m coughing [Music] data hey hey i just finished watering so why don’t I take you on a little tour of what I just did and then we’ll look at how far the garden has come in the last 2 years here is the front border row where we planted the drift rose bush i moved the salvia and the panther nine bark i also switched a billas and put the miss lemonilia right here and earlier in the week I planted this little tappy butterfly bush so going to have a nice little pink book ends here on this front border facing the sidewalk so here is the Willerton Old Hall Rose it’s going to be the star of this little area very soon it’s got one bloom that’s starting to come up right there and I know that it’s going to be full of blooms here in no time and I do know what it feels like to be interrupted by my dog who just wants some attention no you’re a good boy are you going to sit here with me all right you can sit here with me okay so as I was saying um yeah those good gardens you know that just like pull you in uh I think all of our homes inside and out should be a place where we fully relax where we don’t have to perform so for me you know that all really started with planting a little bit of beauty outside my front door i started gardening in 2023 when we bought our first house there was one overgrown shrub and a Bradford pear tree in the front yard and that’s it and then a whole bunch of grass none of those three things are in the front yard today gardening just gave me a new way to create i was looking for a hobby for a long time so it might have started as a way to just fix up the front yard and add some curb appeal but it turned into something else it was more of a habit and a rhythm it became really a way of living uh and just a way to spend time doing something that felt really good i’m especially drawn to plants that have a lot of personality so Salvia with its electric color spires and constant motion that’s got to be my favorite i love uh the different uh growth habits how you can put it anywhere and it just stands out on its own and plays well with others i got my first rose bush this year and I have become obsessed butterfly bushes that are swarmed with pollinators uh just the whimsy the playfulness the color i can’t have enough butterfly bushes and I really love the soft airy movements of plants like gar or nepida and lavender both for its scent and its structure always earns its place in my garden these are the kind of plants that make you look twice make you look deeper they do something interesting even when nothing else is in bloom all right y’all here’s the fun part let’s take a little walk down memory lane uh here’s some clips and videos of how the yard has evolved over the last couple of years you know the main thing I’ll say here it wasn’t until I decided to take up all the grass and just do beds all over the front yard that things really started to take shape it was also the decision that I wrestled with the most i was worried that I wouldn’t have enough plants i was worried how if it was going to look and if it would all really come together but I was on a small urban lot and the beds were really small and honestly it was the best decision that I made and ever since uh once I made that decision everything just kind of flowed freely from [Music] there all [Music] right huh [Music] [Music] will be [Music] [Music] hey [Music] hey hey [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] heat heat [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh my god that was a lot of work today um I’ve been meaning to plant these things for a while now so it feels really good to get all of that done and in the ground because this is perfect growing conditions everything in the garden right now is just really taking off so I’m glad that things are in the ground um feels like this is kind of a finishing point for the front yard at least for now and thank you so much for hanging out with me in the garden today this was a lot of fun to go on this little journey and show you how things have changed in the last 2 years um it was fun for me because you know gardeners rarely stop and recognize all the progress that we’ve made because a gardener’s work is never done so um again I hope you got something out of this hope you enjoyed seeing the transformation maybe you get some ideas for your space if you’re in a similar position um and I hope you stick around and see how the garden continues to grow with me all right bye [Music]