Where do you live? You neglect to mention that.

Your property has some great potential - the oaks in season must be spectacular. But what you are asking from this forum is so far outside the scope of what we may be able to provide and cannot possibly do this property justice - it's simply too large with too many unknowns for us to give you anything more than very rudimentary advice.

First, it is a not necessarily an either/or issue regarding hiring a professional or having a landscape. Developing a satisfying landscape that will showcase your property, compliment your home and address your needs is so much more than just purchasing some plants and materials. Hiring a design professional is SO worth the investment, particularly with a plot as large as this. Depending on your location, it is quite possible that for a couple of hundred bucks a design professional will come to your site for an hour or two, visit with you to get a sense of what you want to accomplish and make some meaningful suggestions about how best to use the property to maximize its potential and give you direction on how best to proceed. And only with the very rich is a landscape completed overnight - this is typically a process that is accomplished over a period of time, often with property this large, a good number of years. Budget with this in mind and prioritize your goals.

If you are adamant about not following this very viable and relatively economical option, then you are going to have to jump into a pretty high learning curve on your own. One of the very first steps is to determine how you want to use this large expanse and how you want it to work for you. You are going to need to spend time evaluating the site as to necessary screening, soil conditions, areas of sun and shade, access to water, where means of circulation should be located, prevailing winds, where outbuildings should be located and their relationship to the residence and a host of other issues. Only after all of this has been established and documented do you start applying your wants/requirements to the process and laying out a "garden".

One of the texts I use when I teach basic landscape design classes is The Complete Guide to Landscaping, published by Better Homes and Gardens. It is a remarkable thorough text for a DYI landscaping book and will take you step by step through the design process. For someone new to landscaping and landscape design, I can't emphasize enough how important it is that ALL these steps be addressed and in the proper sequence. Too often, novices jump right in with the "what shall I plant where" concept and plant selection is one of the very last things to consider.

A couple of other thoughts come to mind:

2 acres is a lot of property to maintain, even for very serious gardeners with a lot of time to devote to their garden. Focus your major planting areas so they are accessible to and accent the residence and leave more distant areas to natural, non-maintained plantings. Investigate what native plants are available for your area and utilize them in these locations.

Lawns and oak trees are pretty incompatible, as your photos attest - if you want a lawn area close to the house, consider removing some trees to open up an area to provide sufficient sun and away from the very competitive tree roots. Research some drought/shade tolerant groundcovers for other areas.

More plants have toxic properties in varying degrees than those that have none. Unless the dogs are chewers, you don't really need to worry about them but because horses are grazers and will nibble on all manner of things, I'd do some research on plants that are most poisonous to horses (lots of resources out there) and avoid those, at least where the horses could get to them. Dogs do have a tendency to develop routes of travel on their properties, so either design with these routes in mind - it'll save significant wear and tear on plantings - or consider devoting an area specifically to a dog run.

Good luck. You've got a huge amount of work ahead of you!

A couple tips on posting to this forum. First off, posting a bunch of large photos just slows down your thread and limits the number of people that are willing to wait for your thread to load. I could have gotten the basic idea with 4 smaller images. A bigger tip is that it is generally not a good idea to post to a forum visited by a number of professional landscape designers and architects and say that a design is a worthless piece of paper.

I can't help out a lot with suggestions on your property. Maybe it would help if you talked about what YOU want the property to become. How do you envision using the property? Would you rather have a cottage garden bursting with color or a woodland garden dominated by foliage?

- Brent

Brent, I don't think the OP was dissin' landscapers, rather they were saying that without the funds to implement it (to buy plants or hardscaping materials) that a professionally designed plan is -for them- unuseable. Gardengal gave some great advice about that.

Myself, I would humbly suggest that they consider selling the horses. Keep one if someone in your family really does ride more than twice a week, but definately don't keep more than one. The reason is that 5 acres is not a pasture, it's a large lot. Unless you're planning to keep these animals stabled all day, it's too small of a plot of land to keep even one, much less multiple equines larger than a Shetland pony. In some places, five acres *could* become one of those expensive to maintain, useless "lawns", but it looks like you have too many trees for the grass to ever take over. I realize you'll be feeding them, and I don't question your ability to buy all the hay and feed they require, but afterall, they are grazing animals. You could keep a ton of hay in front of them at all times, and they're still going to eat every single blade of green grass and tree leaf they can reach. That includes a two and a half foot strip around the outside of every fence, unless you're also putting in a hot wire to prevent their reaching over. Even so, they will strip all the vegetation inside that five acres from approximately 8 feet down. By the end of your first winter, you will have five acres of bare dirt, with only tree trunks and the obnoxious weeds a horse won't eat. And unfortunately, other than a pale green "peach fuzz" of vegetation, you won't see anything grow there again as long as the horses are there.

If you do decide to keep the horse(s), you'll need to be extra careful about what is growing on your place, both what you plant, and what comes up as a volunteer. Even if the animals are well fed, their natural urge to graze is going to have them sampling (and ingesting) all kinds of stuff they wouldn't ordinarilly touch. The old saying "Eats like a horse" is dead on. You'll need to be VERY picky about the hay and feed you do give your animals, because just like browsing strange green plants, you'll find they will eat alot of stuff they wouldn't touch. Your new best friend is going to be the guy who cuts and bales your hay; get to know him well.

I don't know where you are, so this is just a general list off the top of my head of a few things you should *not* plant, or that you should remove immedietly if a previous owner has planted them. There's lots more, but these are commonly used in landscaping:
Yews
ALL Cherry trees
Red Maples
Laurel (popular shrub - pity, as it's lovely in bloom)
Red Clover
Arbovitae
Hydrangea

More detailed lists of what not to plant:
Cornell List of Plants Poisonous to horses
Same thing, tailored for goats If a goat can't eat it, it's a pretty safe bet that a horse can't either.
List from North Carolina Extension Office
List from Oregon State

I am in zone 8. Also I didnt mean to say that a landscape design done by a professional and used for its purpose was a worthless piece of paper. If some of you took it that way I am sorry. What I meant to convey is that if its a choice between the design, and the actual lanscaping. The design does not help me if I then cant afford to do the landscaping because I have spent all my money on the design.

I allready knew what kind of plants are poisonous to horses, and dogs. I wasnt asking for that. I was asking for that to be taken into consideration if giving me advice about what to plant and where. Also I have majorly alkaline soil, I allready know what ammendments to use to neutralize it, but would prefer if some areas utilized alkaline loving plants and save me the cost in those areas of treating the soil.

I will look into the cost of a landscaper to come out and look at the property and give me a design plan, but I have a feeling it will cost in the range of $500-1000 for full plans. Possibly not that much, but it seems to me I read somewhere before that this was around the going rate here.

As for there being too many pictures. I have a broadband connection, as do most people with internet nowadays. If you are a design professional, are serious about using information technology to help out your business, and are still using dial up to connect, you are in serious need of an upgrade. I logged in from my laptop that had never logged in to gardenweb before, and does not contain the pictures posted in my query and was loaded in less than two seconds. So I am not sure what you are talking about with having to wait on a load time unless your using dial up.

Little Dog, thanks for the advice on the horses, allthough as you mentioned its a little off-topic for what I was asking. We have two full size horses, and a miniature horse. All on the five acres in back. They normally dont ever have access to the front two acres that the house is on, unless we take them out to wash them or saddle them. What I failed to mention was that they also rotate onto my fathers 21 acre pasture which is four houses down the street. Yes they do eat most of the green in the 5 acres in back, yes we do use hotwire, and we monitor everything green that comes up back there for purposes of pasture management and poisonous plants. However I never had any intentions of landscaping that part of the property. Only the front. We ride our horses almost every day. If you dont ride them at least three times a week what would be the point in even having horses? We also take them to Mckinney roughs natural trail park which is right across the street and is 6,000 acres of horse trails and natural recreation area. The horses really didnt have anything to do with the landscaping equation other than as an advisory that we would like to keep poisonous plants out of our landscape if at all possible. Thanks for the advice, and comments, but lets stick to the topic I asked about please.

Warning: I am not a professional landscaper. Just one or two comments to help you get started (I hope).

You say you have two acres and don't know where to start. Working with a small budget, I suggest you begin with the areas immediately surrounding the house which are in dire need of renovation. The rest of the property can remain somewhat natural for a long time without detracting from the overall appearance of your home. Then work outward, as time and budgets permit. Also, you needn't feel pressured to formally landscape the entire two acres. Some sections can be left to trees and "meadow" -- just clear debris and undesireable weeds.

It would be worthwhile to take a Sunday drive to observe gardens that both you and your wife find appealing. Make notes of the plants you like and their size and positions relative to houses. Then visit your local nursery; not to buy at first, just to see what is available, check prices, and ask questions about which plants will tolerate your soil. Take notes.

From the bookstore or library, pick up a few books or magazines with garden information specifically suitable to your location. Don't look at English gardens; look at gardens in your state. Get some inspiration. Then do the drive around and nursery visit one more time. (Sorry I cannot recommend plants as I am not familiar with your zone.)
Armed with this general information, you and your wife should be able to to a rough sketch of what you want, and implement your ideas, in stages if necessary.

The multi-tiered fountain/goldfish pond should be very low on your list of priorities for now. Such a large, formal feature would look very out of place unless you do a lot of work paving and formalizing your circle drive first. Taking the style of your home into consideration, it's not really a good match. If you want a water feature eventually, try for a more relaxed look and keep it in scale with your home.

Thanks catkim. I will take all that advice to heart. One thought though about what you mentioned. I know when I spoke of the pond it may have sounded formal, I guess I should have explained in more detail. The pond/fountain, would be one large pond, with three more smaller ponds connected to the first in a cascading effect. All the ponds would be done with natural field stone, and river rock. Both of which there is an incredible abundance of here bieng as how we are only a 1/2 mile from the colorado river, and 10 miles from the local quarry. It would actually look very natural. I guess I also mis-spoke when I said fountain, what I really meant was a waterfall. Sorry for the confusion.

I think you are right though about starting near the house and then working outwards. That makes the most sense to me, I had actually planned on starting with just a seating area in the one picture I have included that showed promise. I thought hostas and vine covered trellis with a very large half circle log bench would look good and work with the varying amount of shade and light that the spot recieves throughout the day.
I definitely need to do something with the beds, just dont know what to do, short of completely ripping them out and starting over.

Please re-read my post. No one suggested that you hire a designer to do a full set of plans (and $500-1000 wouldn't begin to touch a 2 acre property, in my area anyway). From the tone of your post and the questions you are posing, it is quite apparent that you are unfamiliar with this entire process and a couple hour design consultation could at least get you started thinking in the right direction. Have you a realistic budget outlined? Have you articulated - at least to yourself - what activities and/or uses you require from this space? What features need to be preserved, disguised or created? How you will prioritize the work you intend to do to maximize the impact and satisfy some immediate requirements and phase the remaining portions? All of these are very preliminary issues a design consultant can help with.

It bears repeating again - DO NOT even begin to think about plants at this stage in the game. It is entirely far too premature. You need to think about how you are going to use all this space and yet connect it all together. And also again, if you are intent on accomplishing this on your own, you need to do a whole lot of research and basic prep work before anything other than the most basic advice from this forum (which you have already received) will have any type of meaningful application.

And please - if you come here with an extremely broad and open-ended request for help (which many of us receive significant income for providing), do not dismiss or treat lightly or otherwise ignore what is generally considered to be valuable information that someone has taken the time and effort to impart. The burden to narrow the request or to focus and clarify the request as well as make something out of what IS provided is on your shoulders, not ours.

Zone 8 is not a place. Why do you post 15 photos of your house but are paranoid to say what state you live in?

I'm sorry, I thought that was on topic. I have no way of knowing if you had also recently acquired the horses, but having done the "horse thing" pretty much all my life, I couldn't tell you how many places I've seen ruined from the owners trying to keep them on too small of an acerage. No matter how lush and green everything was when they moved in, within a year they would end up with a swept bare, scorched earth look that had all the charm and ambience of a feedlot at the sale barn. Nobody *wants* that, but people tend to overlook that the horses have created an eyesore because they're crazy about the horses. I can understand that. I keep an old pony around simply because I'm a sentimental fool, though he's on twenty acres, not five.

Anyway, my own specific, non professional landscaping advice (drawn from decades of horse ownership experience) would be that if there isn't already a woody, brushy barrier between the horses and the house, you might want to plant one. (min 20 ft wide, more is better) Start with small flowering trees, and stagger medium sized, flowering shrubs in front. Natives preferred, and in keeping for your idea of a woodsy feeling, something that has berries for birds would be best. I'm thinking this could be the "wild" area other posters have mentioned. That way, when a couple of weeks of rain in the spring turn it into muddy slop, or a drought leaves it a dust bowl, it won't dominate the view from the yard you do want to landscape. Stagger the plantings into small groups, and use a number of different species for year round interest. Not sure what would have fall color in zone 8, but an extension agent or the state wildlife department could give you a list of native plants that would be attractive to birds and such.

After that, if you're going to DIY, I'd say to wait a year before you start making permanent (and costly) changes just to get familiar with the property. The best place to sit in the early spring might be too hot in July; you'll only know that after you've been there a while. You might want to turn the swing to face another direction, or decide you don't like looking at the neighbors' outbuildings. The point is, give your place (and yourself) time to settle in.

gottagarden,
We're talking way down Texas way. The area around Austin. McKinney Roughs Park is only a little over a thousand acres, but there's another 6,000 acre state park nearby.

sorry gottagarden, I wasnt trying to be paranoid about where I live. I guess I just assumed that when I have zone 8 next to my name, and mention in my post, and mention in my post that I live in Texas. I just assumed that everyone would know where I lived at that point. My apologies. FYI I live in South Central Texas just east of Austin.

littledog, I understand what your saying about the horses. I have seen the same thing myself. I should have clarified what I meant about recently purchased I guess too. I have been living in this house since last summer. I have lived in this neighborhood for nearly 15 years. So I am fairly familiar with the local weather and soil. Sorry for the confusion.

The reason that people wonder where you live is because there is a huge difference between Zone 8 South Carolina, Zone 8 Washington, Zone 8 Nevada and Zone 8 Texas. It must have been a different thread where you mentioned that you lived in Texas.

I really do think that in order for you to get useful advice you will need to let people know what you want from your landscape. There is a bit of a difference between a landscape for teenage boys to race their quads and one for an elderly mother who loves to watch butterflies. At this point about all I see is that you want a "non-poisonous western rustic" landscape. How much time are you willing to devote towards garden maintenance? Are you willing to invest the time and effort to grow plants from seed or cuttings? Is gardening your passion?

- Brent

Regarding...: "If you are a design professional, are serious about using information technology to help out your business, and are still using dial up to connect, you are in serious need of an upgrade. I logged in from my laptop that had never logged in to gardenweb before, and does not contain the pictures posted in my query and was loaded in less than two seconds. So I am not sure what you are talking about with having to wait on a load time unless your using dial up."

I'm going to answer this for the benefit of other people who might consider posting queries to the forum:

It bears repeating many times that we are not all landscape professionals here. We are people who are interested in the principles and practice of landscape design, supplemented (thankfully) by a handful of professionals who so love their work that they attend the forum on their time off. So we are all here volunteering our time, and it is really really important to me at least that a poster show respect for that fact. By, for example, editing the photo selection so as to show only views that are relevant or important for supplying context, instead of leaving it to others to create themselves a mental model of the property, cross-reference with the text to figure out what the design task is, and mentally edit out the photos that don't matter - having to scroll up and down forty times to complete that process.

Being here as individuals, people remain free to be on dial-up. But even if they aren't, that many pictures can still slow down a computer even if the connection can handle them. And even if it doesn't slow down the computer, it definitely slows down the brain.

As for giving you any advice, I'd have to reiterate that I need to know more about your relationship with gardening and yardwork to make any suggestions.

Okay...let's get down to business here! First question that must be answered and is very important to your design process. What method do you use to clear the property of oak leaves? Hand raking? Blowing them into lines with a riding mower and then raking them up? Use a mulching mower and don't rake, etc.

#2 question... have you had a soil test done? Are you certain your soil pH is alkaline?

#3 question...have you started composting with leaves and horse manure/bedding plus whatever else is available?

Well one easy way to start is to think function, not appearance.

What do you want to do outside? Where on the property do you want to do it? Where do you want to sit with friends and family outside, barbeque, store stuff, do work, play baseball or lawn darts or whatever, etc.

If you have a pond, make sure you have a sitting area by the pond so you can enjoy it. My MIL has a beautiful pond but she never thought about a seating area, so everyone has to stand around in the hot sun to look at it, which reduces the pleasure of it by, oh, about 95%.

Another good place to start is: consider every room in your house. Now, what do you want to see when you look outside? Creating a beautiful view outside of the room in your house where you spend a lot of time is going to give you lots of pleasure, and add value to your property as well.

May I just say you have the start of a beautiful home there, with a lot of potential. Enjoy!

I'm not a professional, but seeing what you've got to work with on such a big scale; I'd say start small.

First: find a good spot to start a compost pile - all those leaves, plus the horse manure and stall sweepings are ingredients us composters envy. Add your coffee grounds and kitchen waste to the mix. The Composting Forum here is quite active and the threads have a wealth of information if composting would be new to you.

Second: start close to the house as was previously suggested. Do some general clean up and clear out, repair the raised beds and amend the soil with your compost.

Third: pick a couple of spots under the oaks to establish drifts of wildflowers since a lawn would be an exercise in futility. Texas boasts of over 5,000 species of flowering native plants.

Simplistic, I know, but many of us who garden started with either a seemingly impossible space to tame or a blank slate full of potential. Hope you have fun with it and enjoy the process.