Need ground cover. Lots of it.

We are in Connecticut, Zone 6B. Soil is rocky, and I guess sand and clay otherwise. This is the front part of our property, which runs northwest from the house to the road. http://ift.tt/1WJGwyR

As you can see, between our front yard (grass) and the road is a large wooded area. These are primarily beech trees. When we bought the house last summer, you could not see the house from the road. We spent a lot of time cutting down beech saplings and assorted underbrush and trimming lower branches from the larger trees. We love the result - there is a lot more light on the property and it's much more welcoming from the street.

The issue is that we now have this forest floor (for lack of a better word). We want to have some ground cover to make a better appearance than the scraggly mix of ferns, weeds, and new beech saplings we have now (beech trees send up shoots from the root system).

We do not want to extend the front yard - way too much grass to deal with. We like the natural transition/border that the line of trees makes at the edge of our current yard.

As you can see, there is pachysandra bordering the driveway. I would say it extends 5'-8' from the driveway. I have been slowly trying to transplant it from this area and other parts of the property to circle the trees, in the hope that it will take and then expand to create a nice carpet of pachysandra under the whole area. Obviously, this is very slow going and I want to see what /r/Landscaping might suggest to speed the process along, or whether we should take a different approach or think about this area differently. Is there a faster growing groundcover we should consider? Vinca?

Experience level - I would say moderate. I do most of my own yard work, but I'm not familiar with bobcats or anything like that.

Budget - I'd rather see what all the options are and not restrict ideas by cost. That said, I'm probably not willing to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on this.

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