A bare entrance island, planted out in a day

The island at the front of a property does more work than any other bed on it. Every visitor drives past it before they park.

This one had thinned out to the point where the mulch was doing most of the talking. The brief was straightforward: replant it, keep the palm, and have the drive open again before the afternoon.

What we did

The old planting came out and the bed was reshaped to hold a clean curve against the paver drive. Variegated schefflera went in on a spacing that lets each plant fill without crowding its neighbour in two seasons, which is the difference between a bed you trim and a bed you replant again.

Irrigation heads were checked and adjusted zone by zone before the mulch went down, so the new planting is actually reached by the water it needs through its first dry months.

Afterwards

The island now sits on the same maintenance schedule as the rest of the grounds. Trimming keeps the shape, and the bed edge gets re-cut on a regular cycle rather than being allowed to blur back into the turf.