Congratulations on the new house, ontheairship. I know nothing about gardening in your climate, so I won't try to suggest plants. However, since it will help other members to know your hardiness zone (there are five in Florida), please tell us (generally) where you live, or look up your zone here: http://www.garden.org/zipzone/index.php It will also help to know which direction the house faces, how much sun the beds get (on both sides of the front yard), and whether the lawn includes any of the invasive types of grass like Bermuda. The palm is directly in front of your front door. You want people to be able to see your front door (which is already difficult, because it's set at the corner of the house, and in a narrow recess to boot), so remove the palm. Remove it now, because it will only get larger. [The shrub closest to the front door is also trying to hide the door.] Most on this forum dislike that type of edger and consider them out-of-date. The white color makes them stand out from the landscaping, but the narrow white lines aren't to scale with your house. They don't lend themselves to curves, so you're either stuck with right angles (not necessarily a bad thing, but limiting) or awkward shapes (like the attempt to "curve" the front bed). Consider also the two beds in the foreground of the final photo: a rectangle and a tiny circle, just inches apart. If it weren't for those edgers, the beds could be combined. Obviously you already own the current edgers, and replacing them with another type of edger will involve an expense. Along the front walk, the edgers seem too close and too busy. For that and other reasons, I would eliminate the narrow bed alongside the garage. The front walk is already narrow, so replace the bed with cement (of course, the older and newer cement likely won't match). If you can afford it, replace the entire walkway: widen it to at least the outer edge of the doorway recess; round the outer corner where the walkway turns around the corner of the garage. The white rock collects weeds and doesn't stay white. Decide how you feel about that. Consider asking the Florida Gardening forum whether a clean rock bed is possible, and if so, the best way to go about it. If you decide to get rid of the edgers and rock, Craigslist is a possibility.

Milehighgirl, thanks for the links. I should have said, but ee planted a small orchard thi spring. We did so will all of our trees purchased from stark bros. nursery. We planted: Apples: stark golden delicious, stark grand gala, red Fuji, goldfish, enterprise, empire, and candycrisp. Cherries: northstar and stark surecrop Peach: intrepid and reliance Plum: bubblegum and starking delicious plum Pear: orient, moonglow, and starking delicious pear I hope we chose ok! Were certainly novices and my father in law has had good luck with his trees purchased from Stark. I'll be asking for pruning help this spring for sure!

my local library just hosted a edible food guru.. and a local mushroom hunter ... if you have interest in either..... i suggest you find local sources.. and watch them eat stuff first ... rather than relying on stranger on the WWW .... [you did well, asking first ... this is for other readers as well] the nightshade family is rather toxic in all its aspects ... ken

Kerri - two questions: 1) Where, approx, in West Texas? We need to figure out what your climate is, and we can do that with a more specific location. 2) Can you post some pictures of your roses? The entire bushes, the blooms, and the leaves you are worried about would be great. To answer your general question, you DO NOT need to chunk your roses altogether - if you can answer the above, we can give you much more specific advice on how to care for them, and perhaps someone on here will live near you and can give you local advice, which is the best. Welcome to the forum! Roses are actually easy to grow - you will have fun. Jackie