Links to the OP's photos: Looking straight out the back door: Looking left: Looking right: Spade-it, how far above ground level is the deck? How far is it from the deck to the back fence? What parts of the perimeter fence (if any) are on your property? Are you allowed to make the fence taller? For instance, if you could add a couple of feet of lattice to the top of the lower sections of fence, the future clematis could grow higher, and that would give you more privacy. Are your privacy concerns on all sides of the yard, or only the south? What exactly is behind you? Part of the neighbor's backyard? Golf course? Park? With the current economy, I'm assuming no one would be building more houses there in the near future. Do you know how much vertical drop there is from the back of the house to the bottom of the back fence? I think it would help us get a better idea of the slope to see a photo taken right at the southern fence and looking north, showing the ground from the house to the fence. It looks -- from what I can see -- as if most of the slope is in the last few feet by the fence. If you'd like your photos to show up in your post, I understand you can insert Photobucket's html code in your post. If you see the photo in the Preview, it will show up in your actual post. Another Photobucket code should give you a working link or a thumbnail photo (again, if the link works in the Preview, it will work in the actual post). [I use a free Firefox add-on, BBCodeXtra, which adds the correct code to make an address a working link, post photos (as ideasshare did), change text to italics and other stuff, plus a few things I have no idea what they do. I have no idea if MS has an equivalent function for IE.] Please ignore ideasshare: obviously his/her plans are not to scale, nor are they relevant to your problem slope.

Thanks for the input so far. Brent - interestingly, nothing is "invasive" in Indiana - but I wouldn't have known that without your post prompting me to check. It was a good though. bhrost - We're the last house in a subdivision that was made out of farmland - so there is unfortunately NOTHING that's native. A surprising number of people have used grasses that I associate with the sea/great lakes - which are hundreds of miles away. saypoint - While our cart isn't before the horse, it's probably next to it more than it should be (?). We do have a complete landscape design, including where the walks are, the driveway, etc. We've also planned for landscape lighting, although the final lighting won't be decided until all the landscaping is planned. I only included the front yard in my message, as I thought the message was too long as it was. As far as your other comments - one of my initial thoughts in looking at the plan was that the shade trees aren't in the right place in the back yard, and I'll work with the designer on that. In addition, from what I can tell/know, the back isn't unified with the front as much as I'd like - so thanks for confirming that it should be. Other thougths always welcome! Emily

To clarify about the palms @ left of house. I wasn't really saying to get rid of them, or that you must keep them. They seem harmless there, but that doesn't preclude you from developing a plan that's better, and ultimately removing/relocating them. If you have ideas for that area, it would be something to hash out in the conceptual design stage. For me, a great visualization tool is Microsoft Paint. It is versatile and easy to use (with each tool well explained in the "Help" section) IF you have basic drawing skills. To use it well, though, it requires that you have a stylus and touchscreen. I use it a good bit to give feedback to people who post in this forum. In your case, however, the pictures you've submitted are not conducive to doing this as they are incomplete views of house faces, and are also from strong angles. For working on the front yard, for example, I'd stand on the city sidewalk, directly in line with the front door (for all pictures) and begin taking shots that aim to the left side of the yard. Pivot the camera rightward and continue taking shots -- all of which would overlap -- until you have captured the right side of the yard. By this manner, all pictures can be pasted into a single window of MS Paint. There, they are cut and re-pasted into a single, wide-view panorama that gives someone a good, realistic idea of how your whole front yard fits together with its surroundings. (This process cannot be shortcut with a panorama app that creates a single panorama out of multiple pictures. That process shrinks and distorts the pictures too much so they no longer convey realistic relationships of things in the picture to other things in the picture.) If you want to do this, consider starting a new thread for the particular face of the house you want to work on and upload the sequence of pictures.

I think you are on the right path with the tree and that it gives a more welcoming look to the overall front when you compare before and after, side-by-side. Usually, when a trim is done after being overdue, there is some waiting for a few spots to fill in. But they'll come. I think you could still do some tweaking ... the two trunk/limbs farthest left are protruding substantially outside of a uniformly shaped cone of trunks. I'd remove them and bring the shape back to symmetrical. Also, some of the right-hand foliage is hanging down just a little low (below the eaves) and looking a little shaggy. I'd trim that off, too.