Circular Drive

Our house has a circular drive, and in the middle are pine trees, dogwoods, and an open center that once had two benches and two swings.  I've been working on getting it looking nice this week.  This picture is a before picture.  I've been using any extra daylight when I'm not at work to rake the center of the island.  Since our house had no one tending it for around 4 years, there were at least 5 inches of pinestraw over the whole thing.  I did manage to get all the pinestraw into one giant pile, probably 6'x5'x4'.  Two nights ago I started burning it all.  My husband said it would burn super fast, and extremely hot.  I guess that would have been true if most of the pinestraw weren't slightly damp.  I stood outside getting it to burn for about 2 hours, then put it all in the middle and covered the flames till it was only embers burning through.  It worked really well because the next morning, it had burned down to about 1 or 2 inches high, instead of 4 feet.  If you look carefully you can see the red concrete pavers I'm going to put in the center, sittin around the pine trees on the left.  I had them placed in the middle, figuring out how I wanted it to look but had to move them to rake. 

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The pavers are these ones from Lowes.  I originally bought 15 at $1 a piece, on sale.  They were by far the cheapest option and I really do like them in our yard.  The red color looks really good with all the green around.  They are 12"x12" and not too heavy for me to move them by myself. 

We are going to keep the placement for 2 benches and maybe 2 swings.  Might just start out with one swing and see what we need.   Around the trees, we'll plant some green ground cover.  Something that grows really well in shade.  I like how this pathway looks. 

It has a stone border like our driveway, and we will someday get a big truck load of gravel to go on the drive way but that will probably be one of the last things we do.  It's thunderstorming right now so I can't show what the island looks like right now, but I'll keep posting the progress.