OK, so now we know why you had all the planters - they were hiding that wall, LOL. Nothing wrong with that idea, but make it easy on yourself and create beds with plants that will hide the wall and spill slightly over the top, softening the look from the patio interior. Always make your beds larger than you think - you have the room to pull this off and those beds must be proportionately large to the scale of your property. The tree rings are not a great idea. They visually "break" the trees from the greenery and look rather like white bulls-eye's plunked in your lawn with tree arrows. I think the major trouble is that where your patio is placed, what do you want to look at? Everything seems very scattered around, without any sense of mystery or cohesive integration, which is why it's troubling you so much. Your basic elements are good - everyone has flaws they have to work around - yet you feel something's missing, but don't know what it is. You have ground level (lawn, patio and short plants) and top-level (trees and pergola), but absolutely nothing in the middle-layer to integrate it all together into a whole satisfying mix. Your patio as it sits in the lawn is like a promontory view point in the middle of a desert. It's all flat and laid out for everyone to see. Stand in the middle of the patio, turn 360-degrees and you can see everything in it. There's no sense of "what might be around the next corner?" to add interest. No matter what your style of gardening you need to always integrate the top and bottom layers with a good selection of mid-height shrubs. These will add color and interest to your garden 365 days a year without needing to always depend upon flower bloom. It is where you get the critical balance of leaf color, texture and shape to interest the eye and provide specific "focal points of interest". As it stands now the eye drifts over your garden greens because they're either too much the same color or too isolated to hold interest. It lands on the wrong things; e.g., the whiteness of the stone or the position of the patio. Think of your garden like the outside shell of your house. Whether you stand at your front door or your back door, you can see some of the rooms but not all of them. Walking further inside, you can see more revealed, as well as a hallway or another doorway that obviously leads somewhere else. Your rooms have flooring (ground layer), furniture such as desks, beds, or bookcases (middle layer), and windows and overhead lights (top layer). If your rooms only had a rug on the floor and a hanging light fixture, think how empty that looks! Fill it with an interesting mix of furniture with different textures, textures, colors and shapes - and suddenly you have a pleasing, beautiful room to live in. A garden is similar in concept. It is an exterior shell, into which you place disparate elements to both contrast and complement one another into a visually pleasing whole. Good luck to you going forward!

Ideally, it's great to have an overall plan, healthy budget and do all your hardscaping first. However many of us have to rely on an overall idea of what we want, limited budget and DIY :) If you can afford it, I would recommend fencing in your right side and back, so you can create your own private area. This will minimize damage from dogs and other neighbor issues...and give you some screening for that vegetable garden. If you like shrubs that bloom, it might be nice to have taller ones against the fence and shorter ones closer to the yard. You might even be able to add some bulbs for spring color, that will grow up through the mulch. If you don't want too many, even a corner or two with daffodils that have naturalized can be very pretty. Do you want a more formal layout (rectangular) or more informal, with a few curves and rounded inside corners? Do you plan to have any shrub roses? They are beautiful and often very fragrant...and can even have few or no thorns. Many old-fashioned roses need very minimal care and bloom for four to six weeks. We have many in eastern Washington (cold winters/hot summers) and they do very nicely, even with the cold and snow. The nice thing about shrub roses is that they look so good with butterfly bushes, clumps of lavender, spirea, forsythia, pontillia, catmint, etc. If you do decide to use lavender, munstead is a nice gray/lavender and grows fairly large...Hidcote stays smaller and is more blue/purple. Both do well with our cold winters and don't mind the extra water that Mediterranean lavenders dislike. Have fun with your garden! :) Hidcote lavender... From Lavender's Garden Celsiana shrub rose (wonderful rose that changes from pink to almost white) with (I believe) Excellenz von Schubert rose (smaller pink in background) daisies about to bloom under Celisana, Salvia (dark purple) and Hidcote lavender (lighter purple).... From Lavender's Garden This post was edited by lavender_lass on Fri, Dec 20, 13 at 14:46

I think this is going to turn out to be a learning experience for you over the next few years when you see how huge that grass is going to become. In spite of people saying you must move it away from the fence, it is much too close to it and the bed it's in is much too small. One plant should not be closer than 3' to 3 1/2' to the fence. Also, there is no point in placing two like that. Isn't there another corner of the back yard where you could use it to balance out the overall scene? ...Or somewhere else? If you look how big and fat the plant is in my illustration, which I'm not exaggerating, you'll see that the current placement is not going to work out. If you want to add color in front of the grass, increase the bed size large enough to accommodate more plants. You could expand the bed either to right or left along the fence. Or you could make a quarter circle bed that goes from side fence to back fence, and encircle the entire front of the grass with a lower perennial. Hybrid daylilies might work out well as they take full sun, are easy, and can be very long blooming. Or, you could do annuals.

So the basketball court will be at the end of the yard and new planting beds to the left of the pic above next to the house. I envision the tree will be to the right in the pic above. Just can’t visualize how the path will go front yard to gate.