First of all, thanks for sharing this post. Your ideas on how to get and use landscape design help are very enlightening and I think could help a lot of folks on the forum. Most of us can't afford a landscaper to do all the work, but finding ways to collaborate is sometimes difficult. Some landscapers want to do everything from start to finish because that's the way their business is set up. But there are alternatives and we have discussed them on this forum before. The only other thing I might add to this discussion is what's the road like? The reason I ask this is my best friend lives on a busy road, and she put a berm in front of her house out by the road, and planted it with trees and shrubs. Then she has a fence along the driveway with a gate leading into the front garden. She has a patio out there and when you sit out there you'd swear you were in the most out-of-the-way secluded spot, even though it is right along a major commuting route. The berm worked wonders to screen out noise, and the landscaping makes it all feel very intimate. Of course I could be way off base, maybe this is not an issue for you.

I'd make that strip between the driveway and the sidewalk walkable somehow- I'd put pavers or bricks or concrete or something there. A smooth walkway between the two areas is good when carrying groceries or just walking- you don't need to be wondering where to step in your front parking/walking zone. And mowing, edging, and weedeating a strip like that is ridiculous. I'd extend that surface to the space where the front entrance area/front porch should be because now there isn't one. It looks as if you step right out of the house onto lawn- there's not what we used to call a "goodnight" zone. I'd take that zone down to at least where the little crosswalk thing is. Then you could have some seating and nice large pots of things to soften the expanse of brick between the door and the window. I would change out that wrought iron support post to something more contemporary. If the tree is sentimental, perhaps it could be thinned so the house is still visible behind it instead of blob of green. Until we know the species I guess we can't decide on that. Then it's just a matter of edging the hardscape with a border of some sort- size and plants depending on your interest and time available. If you loooove gardening the border could become a bed encompassing the tree itself which would simplify mowing tremendously. Why are there no shutters on the one upstairs window? One of these things is not like the others, LOL.

Thanks for the design. I like what I see. What is the darker green that flows from the front door to the front right corner? FYI--I forgot to mention that I plan on: Tearing out the mail box planter on the left side of the drive way. Removing the octagon shaped box just in front of the front door. Removing the grey brick appendage on the right side of the drive way. I really want a sweeping walkway that starts at the bottom of the front door step and sweeps downward to the edge of the driveway and the sidewalk. Many thanks All!

Well, let me start by saying that I don't have a mailbox like that, so my opinions are exactly that - opinions - and no more. I think you have a point when you say they don't look great growing out of the grass. But they don't make really convincing flowers either :-) What a mailbox garden in an otherwise plain yard says to me is "I couldn't think of anywhere else to put a flowerbed." That said, if having a mailbox garden is important to your wife, it doesn't seem worth having a war over. They can be cute, and they are actually a bit of an American cultural icon :-) An image search brings up lots of ideas for them by the way, including a charming row of mailboxes springing up out of the grass - but it seems to me that mailboxes have a function. I would think that function is best served if you have a brick pad around/beside it to stand on, which would also make mowing around it easier. Maybe a brick or paver pad, or even a 24" x 24" slab, with the flowers adjacent and good edging in a nicely shaped bed would be the best of all worlds. For my taste, a bed without hardscape always looks a bit accidental (unless it has really crisp edges). I always say that landscape design is for people, and so what constitutes good design in each place depends on who lives there. We, and the renegade gardener, can only give some objective guidelines, which if followed slavishly in all cases would create their own kind of undesirable outcome. So your landscape should definitely reflect your preferences. I'm also not a foundation planting guru - I prefer no foundation planting in the vast majority of cases - but let me take a stab at the problem with yours. I remember in an old thread, our guru Laag saying that a dark-foliaged plant reads in the landscape as a dark hole, or something to that effect, and gave as a solution something about backing it with something green. So one possibility is that the purple foliage is itself the problem. Only in this case, maybe if you put something bright green in front of it, using the barberries as a background, they might look better - deepening the bed to accommodate another layer of planting. You could also consider extending the foundation planting as far to the left as an antidote. Maybe move a barberry beyond the house corner. It looks on the aerial view as if you have some space there. But if you do that I would actually shift the planting weight away from the front door. The other general idea I was hoping you might pick up from those threads I linked earlier was about creating space in front of a recessed doorway instead of shutting it in. You have a fair bit going on there - I don't like what's in the middle either. But somehow what really bugs me here is that you have two uneven sections of your house, the garage one and the one to the left of the door. The one to the left of the door is smaller already, and your planting is hiding more of it; your tree will later do more of the same. That's why I would rather be able to see (or at least discern) the foundation of that section. And in contrast, the plantings on the garage side do such an inadequate job of hiding any of its mass that they look a bit... incongruous. They have no hope. They do not begin to address the blank mass over the garage door, which I think is what needs... screening, disguising, balancing... things that plants may not be able to do here (your tree on the right will maybe do it later). I don't know all the things that a person can do with that wall. Perhaps a little rooflet to match the one over the window on the right? A section of grey siding? Out of my realm there, but you get the idea. But in pursuit of having plants help with it, I would draw the bed on the right up toward the house instead of down to the driveway entrance. That will also maintain better sightlines for driveway egress. KarinL