They have a very interesting visitors greenhouse. The front part is all potting stuff, with some very decorative pots. Then you can wander through the sizeable visitors greenhouse which I found very interesting last time I was there. Maybe not as spectacular as Parkside, but if you're an orchid nut, you'll be entertained. This is assuming they haven't made any major changes in the past four years or so since I was there. My impression is that these days (and for some days past) they cater to clientele wishing potted flowering orchids - I know the law firm where I work gets its display orchids from Venany - we would probably be one of their biggest clients. Lots of oncidium intergenerics and phals, but always gorgeous and healthy. More interesting things at the greenhouse. J

I am sensing by your comments, NYC, that you are not quite getting the purpose of the sketch I offered, which is to inspire a direction, not to prescribe a specific, etched-in-stone solution. The concept is: visually obscuring the back door some from a distance, and using minimal signage, combined with a modified walk layout (which you are invited to improve upon,) in order to direct traffic to the front of the house. Once people are on the way, they will continue to the front door. The concept would be refined by working out all of the details of how it is to be done in PLAN VIEW, not in a perspective view picture. The measured plan view lets you know exactly how much distance you have from one object to the next, in order that you can place things properly. Regarding proximity of arbor to back door and the issue of impeding light entering the house, it looks to me that you have roughly 40 or so feet of space between the house and the parking area with which to "play." By the look of the sketch, I think I've plopped the arbor somewhere between 12' and 16' clearance from the house. In the plan view that you create in order to organize future work, you could place the arbor 20' from the house, if you thought that improved upon its placement. So I can't really grasp why you'd use light entering the house as an obstacle. The arbor goes where you put it. Where I put it, it doesn't even look like an impediment to light to me. Any nearby trees have a much greater chance of affecting light entering the house. In another, separate, picture, it looks like you have much less distance between the parking and house. One, or possibly both picture views, may be misleading as to what the real truth is. That's, again, why the actual landscape-work-to-done must be laid out in a measured-to-scale, PLAN VIEW. Regarding "framing" -- edging -- the drive or walk with shrubs and/or groundcover, I do not see why you think this is necessary or desirable. Well grown and tended grass, in the places where there is sufficient light, seems preferable. In the areas where there is not sufficient light, a low groundcover would be best ... not as an "edging" per se to the paved areas, but as a bed of groundcover that works on its own accord. If it happens to abut the pavement, that is not a problem.

@sandy (z5b nys) ha! I first planted nepeta for my own housecats (with some nagging guilt about being a parent encouraging drug use, lol). My cats have passed on but the catmint stays and has done better than possibly anything else in my garden (with the exception of madonna canadian anemones, which are crazy invasive, and the native columbines and lupins that volunteer up here in ME like weeds). The white version of nepeta is hard to find in my area but I snagged some a few years back and it’s just wonderful, smaller, more compact and tidy — actually, possibly a perfect plant for anita the OP? blooms a bit later than the blue and lasts a long time, looks a bit like baby’s breath. @anita55 – in terms of old-fashioned flowering perennials, some other straight ones that do well for me without floppage are maltese cross (3-4 ft when established — they take a few years — red-orange, about four weeks from june into early july and sporadic thereafter). Also giant hyssop is very tall and straight, to 5-6 feet, with lovely purple wands from july-august, and it always brings the monarchs. Have you tried bee balm?

Even though it's completely "modern" in decor now, it's not much different in spirit from how many of these houses would have been lived in when new. Not a lot of furniture, furniture that can be moved around, furniture that does not necessarily have a fixed position in the room. Unfinished floors or painted floors. If the homeowner was wealthy enough, carpet tacked down to it. One of the historic houses here shows in its records that the floors were regularly sprinkled with sand and swept out during the muddy season. (The fireplace in the red dining room is the same as the double fireplaces in my LR).