Well, I was gonna post another pic or two but can't seem to figure out how. Suggestions for that too?

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

Karin, it's interesting and enlightening to read what others think of our house and landscape, even if we may not agree or take up some suggestions. We live in an area where we don't have a large number of options for landscape/garden design, unfortunately! So no worries about me being offended by criticism/suggestions, etc. We appreciate the help and we will work to think about each decision in terms of its purpose. We originally had purposes in mind for each bed in our backyard, though it may not look like it now - with the exception of the hydrangeas along the back fence. They were originally planted behind our garage (where the pool equipment enclosure is now). When we put in the pool, we moved them to the side bed (which didn't exist before the pool) along the fence, but the neighbor's black walnut tree hampered their growth. So rather than throw them away, we made a new bed along the back, sort of a temporary spot until we figure out what to do with the rest of the beds. I won't bore you or anyone else by enumerating the purposes of the other beds in the back, but just want to add that we also did have more visual interest and contrast in flower, foliage, and form - but many of those plants didn't survive. We've been in a sort of holding pattern back there for a couple years - and I'm looking forward to improving that landscape. But back to the front yard/landscape. One of our goals for changes remains to revise the long bed along the drive for the dual purposes of easier maintenance and including more variety in its plants to provide more interest in months other than July. Another goal is to revise the small bed near the side steps to make it better looking (instead of a hodgepodge of plants, as it is now) and as a memorial garden for our daughter, with beautiful plantings. We also still want to improve the visual impact/visibility of the front door. To me, that is a separate goal from emphasizing the front entrance, if by entrance one means the wide front steps (which aren't truly the entrance to the house, but visually they do give that impression). We understand the goals of Laag's ideas about beds in front of the steps and a wide path from the driveway to the steps/porch. But in terms of practicality, we don't want people to stop midway up our driveway and walk up the path, because then they block the entire driveway. Also, the steps are covered with snow for the entire winter (it's too expensive to pay to have them cleared each time it snows), and a walkway would also be covered in snow, so the practical function of a walkway beginning partway up the driveway wouldn't apply during those months. I've been bothered for a while by the sense of imbalance between the long driveway bed and the expanse of grass on the other side of the drive, so another purpose of making changes is to see if we can balance that. Laag's suggestion about a grassed area in the long bed was so helpful - I just don't know whether that is enough to achieve balance, or if we will need a bed under the birches. A new purpose resulted from a number of comments here, and that is to soften the impact of the veranda wall. I think we are just so used to how our house looks that we don't see it for how it really appears. You all have opened our eyes to this issue! I haven't been in the back yards of the houses above us (in the back) to see what they can see of our back yard. It "feels" private in our back yard most of the time, probably due to the fence, but I still don't do any skinny-dipping. ;-) The front feels very public to me (it's a busy street and in the spring/summer/fall, a very busy golf course), with the exception of the veranda. On the rare occasions when we are seated there (it's usually too hot/buggy/raining/cold), we have at least the illusion of privacy behind that fortress wall - though with close neighbors, we have to watch how loudly we talk. My sister mused aloud a few years ago about the idea of putting a hedge across the front of the yard (on the lawn on the house side of the sidewalk, if you're facing away from the house) to screen the street and provide more of a sense of privacy. A neighbor a couple of houses down has a partial bridal wreath hedge in the yard and she was noting that at the time. I'll update as we get further along in this process; meanwhile, if anyone has more comments/suggestions, we're very happy to have them.

Thanks for the nice comments! The garden is my main hobby - and my passion :-) One of the reasons we bought this property was the existing ash, white pines, and young red oak that made a perfect setting for a garden. The rest was pretty much a blank slate, so it's come a long way in the past 14 years - and there's still more that needs doing... - thank goodness! (I'd be terribly bored if there were no changes required!) pm2- the clematis on the end of the garage is supposed to be Nike (I have a lot of clematises that appear to be not what the label said it was supposed to be!) The color is a bit odd this year - it's usually has a redder undertone - this is what it looked like last year: Perhaps the cooler temperatures this year affected the color....? As for the size and bushiness - I never bother cutting my group 3 clematies back hard. I just trim off any obviously winter-killed bits and trim them as necessary to neaten them up a bit. That seems to work for me to get vigorous bloom from them top to bottom! They get a small dose of clematis fertilizer in late May or early June. I suspect it'll be another two years at least before the clematises on the fence side of the swag will make it up to the chains. I had to replace a few that didn't make it through their first year in the ground (planted in late summer 2010). Thanks for the 'Golden Shadows' suggestion. That looks like a possibility. I actually have a Wolf Eyes dogwood a few feet to the left where it gets a bit more light and moisture through a break in the tree canopy: I'll have to think about whether the two different variegations would go together or not. Maybe the golden one could be shifted far enough to the right to give some visual separation while still screening the shed. thyme - my pruning technique for the heptacodium (and most things in the garden) is 'if a branch is in my way when I walk past, lop it off!' :-) Actually the heptacodium tree is an odd shape when viewed from the side. It is planted close to the old cedar clump so the heptacodium had no room to develop branches on the side closest to the cedar. If you look at it in the picture of the front garden from the road you can see that it sort of looks like half a tree! But if you look at it beside the bench in the picture through the iron abour, it looks perfectly normal! That is the way we most often see it so we don't particularly care about the odd look of it from the side.... I doubt that the heptacodium would snap unless perhaps it was in a very exposed place, so if yours has some shelter from wind, I wouldn't hesitate to prune it up a bit. The clematis swag started as a rose swag in an effort to try to control the New Dawn roses that used to grow on the south gate arbour. I loved the rose swags we saw in England and wanted to try one. It was very pretty; but we got tired of those wicked thorns! The Clematis montana on the arbour had started to climb on the swag so that gave us the idea of using clematis as a 'kinder and gentler' alternative to roses for the swag. So far it seems to be working out reasonably well. Copper pipes are handy to work with! Yes, the fence and gate is pipes threaded through a wooden frame. The gate just after we completed it in the garage: If I was doing it again, I'd have painted the wood the Bonsai green of the dark trim on the shed instead of the sage green we used. It is too much of a PITA to repaint it now! I don't treat the pipes at all - they rapidly turn brown so blend in to the plants and disappear. It'll be many years before the copper turns to verdigris green. It would be easy to make a trellis with copper pipes. The big clematis at the back of the garage is on a tripod I made with copper pipes threaded through wooden stretcher bars. The link below will take you to a thread in the clematis forum where I describe how it was built.... The iron arbour and tuteurs are also things I designed and had a local iron craftsman make for me: I like making things - but welding iron is beyond me! :-) Mario said 'if you can draw it, I can build it' - he was fun to work with but is retired now. Thanks mxk3 - green and serene is my major goal - for the backyard in particular. anitamo - the panel idea is a good one - I've given some thought to the possibility of doing something that would create a trompe-l'oeil arbour/gate implying the garden continues into the distance... I think it would take perhaps more work than I want to do at this point so I'll probably go with a tree/shrub if I can. But I still have a yen to do something trompe-l'oeil somewhere....! This post was edited by woodyoak on Sun, Jul 7, 13 at 12:06