I'm with Tibs. If this is a spot where your visitors will ever park, then those people, for better or for worse, should be a governing concern. When I visit my aunt, who has a driveway and no sidewalk (and a lovely garden), it is usually for an evening event like a Christmas dinner or something (ie it's DARK) and I have to step out into either her fairly soggy uneven grass or her neighbour's roadside bed of ivy, which, like Hypericum or vinca or any plantings, is not pleasant esp as I'm usually wearing my better shoes. I'm not elderly yet, but I'm not going to like it any better when I am. And if someone is bringing Grandma to your house for Thanksgiving, you can bet they won't arrive early enough to get the spot in the driveway. What I see is that you don't have a sidewalk to the house so people getting out of their cars to visit you will be walking up the driveway anyhow. What strikes me as perfect here is to flare the bottom of the driveway into one of those wavy-edged paths that you've posted from the Renegade Gardener site, tapering to nothing (or punctuated with a finishing circle?) at the left edge of your property. You could do it in flagstone and take a picture of the layout so that you can redo it fairly easily if one of the utility companies does dig it up. Then your gardening would start higher up the easement and might not get disturbed, or you could do an adjacent strip of grass and then a berm as suggested above. Anyway, for walking and snowplowing and whatever other functional concerns you have for the front yard, I'd definitely think the hardscape all the way through before I started planting - that's rule # 1, right? Those itchy fingers in spring can mislead you into jumping too far ahead. Quite aside from practicality, I don't like the look of plantings to the roadside (except in exceptional cases as I imagine Bahia's to be). I can't put my finger on why; perhaps that it is like a painting without a frame. Most of us just don't paint well enough for the composition to stand on its own. I have to say that I know how irritating that easement is, as I also have one. Just when you convince yourself to throw off the yoke of fear that they're going to come along and tear up your work... then you start letting yourself design something so complicated that it really WOULD break your heart if it were disturbed.

Tall fescue is the most salt tolerant and one of the most drought tolerant of the cool season turfgrasses

I'm starting to think this is some weird type of hybrid between Euphorbia corollata and another species (maybe with the narrow-leaved version of E. cyathophora). Those white-margined bracts and flower bases are very much like E. corollata.

I believe it is a type of Desmodium which is known to some as ticktrefoil. It should be native.