Wow you received lots of responses. Without reading all the posts, my first thoughts are: Remove existing walkway and make a new one that is 4 feet wide, flares at both ends and is 4 to 5' from the house. You need a deciduous med size tree on the left side of your house to soften the hard lines of the house cornor and to visually off-set where your house ends. A large tree in the back of your house will help balance the scale between the size of your home and the never ending sky, I am a big fan of plantings that are viewed from the inside of the home. I can't be sure from the photos how much room you have so my ideas might be way off. Pictures tend to make spaces seem bigger then what it really feels like when standing in the site. So forgive me if my ideas prove to be totally of base. These are just some of my design principals. I do not think you should put taller shrubs under the window, it will only create a bulky look. Try small low groundcover 12inches, evergreen, and carry the bed to the other side of the walk so you are walking between a sea of green, maybe long blooming clematis w/trellis on wall if exposure is apropriate or something like an Enkianthus which is an upright growing decideous shrub with great follage and a growth habit that can be prunned and kept natural and airy and NOT sheared into a ball or square thus making your house look more boxy. Good luck. Remember that works of art take time so rather then you budget controlling the final results, let the best design do the controlling a little at a time. Ally

Yeah, if it were my propterty, the rocks have to go, if you keep your trees and especially if you add more. You'll surely regret the combination for maintenance, plus it looks odd. Give bit more thought to what you really want once you understand what's going to happen under lots of trees. Roots, no grass, need to mulch and will still have rake up leaves out of your yard every year and will have to weed the grass-less mulched areas to some extent. I haven't been impressed with the "natural mulch" of falling leaves in the front yard--they drift where they want to and leave bare other places, drift up against the house, etc and so you usually need to rake or shred or otherwise deal with lots of leaves on a residential lot. Not saying you have to make it all TIDY, with nary a leaf in sight, but just that I've not been able to just let them all stay where they will and still carry out proper home maintenance and even growth of other plants (in the forest, it's survival of the fittest and not necessarily in the shape you'd like). It may well work, but I think I'm hearing you may have a kind of fantasy image of a domesticated forest floor. Certainly the gravel is out of place in it. You might do just as well with nicely placed shade tree or 2 and some shrubs. Have you made a mostly-to-scale sketch of your front yard? That will help you decide where to place trees, which you can sketch in with their expected canopy spreads. It already looks like yours are too close together, but it may just be the problem with evaluating distances from a photo. 30'x 40' seems only big enough for 1 or 2 shade trees plus a few smaller understory shrubs or trees.

The meadow isn't going to be substantially different from what you currently have. Left totally alone, it will turn back into forest surprisingly fast. Even if you left it for a year, it would fill up with enough woody plants that it would need serious equipment to clear. So it is less a different object, than that your opinion of it changes. Personally, I wouldn't bother trying to preserve the view of the garden by the road. I'd be perfectly willing to deepen or create a shrub border between the road and the lawn, then create a new garden on the other side of that border. That should eat up a fair amount of lawn.

Thank you, Yardvaark, i really like you suggestion, it looks cleaner and more inviting this way. We do have a room for another bed. I was thinking of a retaining wall with two tiers of the side of the front door, but the way you suggest, i think we can skip it, out budget for this project is rather limited. So thanks again.