I saw your house on the Design Forum. The reality is that the house is very long and low slung. I think any kind of tree/shrub grouping would help. Seems like you are willing to do a really big project. What is the rest of the neighborhood like? I just came back from Idaho,new construction uses alot of 'berming' and irrigation systems to keep those bermed trees alive. I suppose the berming is to give more height to new plantings? Soil for high desert areas? Anyhow, why berm? Can you just plant evergreens and trees in groups along the sidewalk? Are you looking to really hide a bad view across the street? Make a 'court yard' for the front entry using a fence or stone wall.Add your garden plants,then have the woodland near the sidewalk. Just brainstorming. p.s. I found some really beautiful parts of the country in Idaho. Good luck with your 'project', franeli

"... we have a contractor but need design help ..." It's going to boil down to you doing your own design work or hiring a designer to do it. The contractor will need written directions to follow. If the directions are too general, he will likely "fill in the gaps" but possibly not to your liking or with certainty of sticking to the budget, even if he is the greatest contractor in the world. If your intention is to hammer out ideas/direction in your mind prior to hiring a designer, you're short-circuiting much of the forum's potential to help you. Without proper pictures (complete scenes of connected pictures), or a base plan (an "empty" map of the relevant area of the yard), onlookers are limited to offering general do's & don'ts instead of feedback that is specific to your project. As an example, in one of your earlier pictures, there's a building at the left side of the photo; but we don't know what that is since a garage is elsewhere, or now, even if it's your property. One wouldn't know the constraints of your project if they don't know these basic facts. There is, so far, a lot of information not shown in the photos since they are, more or less, snaps of various portions from various angles.

@Yardvaark @decoenthusiaste Thank you for your inputs. Will surely think about the palm tree placement. Also, my bad, I should have specified earlier that the door in the picture is not the front door, but the door to the spare room on the 1st floor. The front door is the one with the grey tiles & 2 windows beside it. Here are a couple of better pictures (Photo 1- brown door on extreme right) Photo-2 Front Door No HOA so we are sorted on that front. Any specific kind of pavers you would recommend for the space keeping in mind that we don't have a very big budget yet want to add value & make the space usable. Also, the yard has an automatic slope- what would we need to consider on that front while hardscaping? Also, any views on artificial turf?

I really appreciate all the feedback! Igteacher - your retaining wall planter looks great, I like that it is a rounded shape! From the looks of it, it is a nice chill spot for the furry friends. Your metal planter seems to be doing well too with all that green lush vegetation. The yard is not that shady alll the time. The photos were taken early evening and there are times of the day when there is direct hot sun for several hours (less so against the walls due to the shadow of the trees). My mom wouldn’t go for metal, but last night I ventured onto the HD and Lowe’s site and saw some decent examples of retaining wall material. We would be requesting the landscape company to skim off some of the old soil and rocks and put in top soil. Should we have them put in anything else or do the amendments ourselves? I’m not very strong and have a small car and no other help, but can add a few bags of whatever amendments are recommended at a time. ital mover - I wish I could change my mom’s mind too! The whole project then would be done for thousands of dollars less! My mom isn’t so much for organic gardening but I think I jogged her memory of how fun gardening can be by watching lots of gardening YouTube videos when she visits me. Such a great hobby! I myself have only a tiny patio in my condo. 3onthetree- thank you so much! I very much appreciate the “background” information! I also feel better knowing that cinder ash isn’t really an issue to be concerned about. You’re on point with the types of material that can be used. It all makes sense now looking at the Home Depot website and how they’ve categorized into such things as retaining wall blocks, garden wall blocks, pavers, stepping stones, etc. You also made another good point about picking a material that doesn’t compete so much with all we already have going on there. I’ll try to get my mom to settle for something simpler that can blend in coloring wise to the existing pavers. See the picture of our neighbor’s front yard planter my mom wants to emulate— I won’t let her though! For retaining wall material, how do you recommend we deal with the soil leaching dirt thru the joints? Is a liner sufficient? What soil amendments do we need to do to the top soil? Manure? Sand? Thank you again! You clearly laid out the different options for material and the basics of how the install should work. Now I know to go over that with whoever we end up hiring. neighbor‘s frontyard garden wall: