These are all such good ideas. Wanted to suggest too that once your photos are taken of your house, overlay with tracing paper and roughly sketch in sun/shade areas and then some plantings, shrubs and small tree(s). Fun to play around with various shapes and forms...tall/narrow or low/rounded, etc. I'm going to disagree a little with Rhizo's statement, "No plants should visually or physically 'barricade' the front entrance of the home, or any part of the front." I'd agree generally but prefer to plan our garden for our specific needs/privacy. For example at our former home, a 1950's ranch house set far back on a wooded lot, the huge front 'picture window' and the screened porch on one end of house were too open to passersby (I don't like window coverings in daytime). I planted a small grove of dogwoods to shield the left-hand portion of our house and tie in better with the side yard filled with mature trees. Didn't cut us off completely but gave a sheltered feeling we liked to our main living space. (Plus we preferred looking at our Dogwoods to looking at cars going by and houses across the street.) This was in an older neighborhood of huge lots...wouldn't work in so many other locations, nor suit other folks perhaps~~smile. Just mentioned this to suggest that you consider your views from inside the house as well as street view and to plan your garden for your specific house. No one plan fits all. Another suggestion...visit nurseries now when they aren't too busy and look for plants with good winter color, branch structure, berries, etc. for winter interest. Plus the staff have more time now to answer your questions. Good luck...I envy you a little starting fresh...josh

Here is the tree. Susan Here is a link that might be useful:

When the flowers brown, go ahead and mow....you will be leaving the seeds in the lawn....and after the flower is brown, I would assume they have ripened enough to be viable. Linda C

Revo is an excellent program I have recommeneded it here and elsewhere for a long time and it usually provides excellent results. Plus it has some other great features other than being an uninstaller, I suggest reading up on the site as to the various uses, it is a great tool for addressing your start up programs. Their site has great tutorials on each aspect if you click on each aspect then click to go to the user guide it is very helpful. " Revo Uninstaller gives you another 8 handy and powerful tools to clean up your system. Here is the list of the tools and utilities included in Revo Uninstaller: Auto Start Manager - Stop programs that start automatically on Windows startup; speed up loading of Windows! Windows Tools Manager - Handy and useful tools bundled with every version of Windows; easily find useful system tools and options! Junk Files Cleaner - Find and remove unnecessary files from your computer; free up disk space and delete files you do not need! Browsers History Cleaner - Erase web browser history, visited pages history and temporary internet files of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape and Opera web browsers; free up a lot of disk space by deleting temporary internet files like temporary saved videos, temporary flash files, temporary pictures etc! Office History Cleaner - Remove the history of most recently used files in MS Office; remove your tracks by deleting the list of last opened MS Office documents! Windows History Cleaner - Remove the history of recently opened files, delete temporary files, remove usage tracks and other history items that are saved by Windows; remove your tracks saved by Windows for a lot of operations! Unrecoverable Delete Tool - Erase files and folders forever; be sure that nobody could recover your files and folders after deleting! Evidence Remover - Make sure already deleted files, folders and other data are unrecoverable; securely erase your data!"