i have squirrels as much as rabbits and i know they eat a lot of my garden. the perimeter fence doesn't seem like it would do a lot in my situation. fortunately i live in the city limits and do not have deer in my yard. i would also want a fence i can easily get over (or go through a gate) to water, weed, pick etc. the square foot gardening book has a suggestion. the short version is that, for example, if your garden is 4x4 feet, you make a 4x4 wooden frame that fits right on or around your box. you take something like chicken wire (from a 4 foot tall roll) and have it come vertical off the frame for 2 feet, bend it 90 degrees, run the 4 feet across the frame and then back down 2 feet. you use pieces of 2x4 foot fence to patch the sides and you have a animal resistant lid. it will let through light and water. of course that won't work for the vertical growing. this year i jumped from 2 square foot garden style boxes to 6. i intentionally planted things that got eaten up in 2 of the boxes, and will put the lid on them when the time comes. everything may get nibbled, but, for example, i did not get to eat one strawberry last year. most of my garden was fairly ok until i got a groundhog. that's a whole different story. the chicken wire is not pretty, but that's the cheapest solution for full enclosure. obviously you can balance your preference of appearance with cost. just remember to keep it light weight so you can easily remove it for weeding and picking. that may be a more intense cover than you need, but there are options. i personally tried some of the animal predator urine smell stuff and the other mixes and it didn't seem to do anything. maybe i got the wrong kind, or the garden was just too appealing. i will give some of them another go as a preventative measure though. they are cheap enough to try another brand.

Shee, I wish I could give you a hug. I can appreciate how overwhelmed you feel (it's how most of my life feels from time to time!). Let me try to put things in a more manageable state, and I'm afraid I'm going to contradict some other posters in doing so. They have good advice, but it's not all what you need right now. I really do think you should go to the LD forum, it's really not a bad place. Your question about symmetry in DH's plan is a perfect one to focus on to start with, though you should obviously present your project as a whole. Just go in looking for tips to help you design it yourself, rather than for someone to design the thing for you. That's exactly what the forums are for! DO link to this thread, so that people there don't have to repeat what people here have already said. I'm sure you will find that the conversation evolves toward resolving other questions, and people will ask you to clarify things. Perhaps what needs to be articulated about LD is that it is not a hand-holding, cheerleading forum, but rather a place for problem-solving and analysis. The funny thing is that HD and LD are almost a bit like female/male equivalents of each other. Quality analysis of design occurs in both places, just in HD it is embedded in a warm, supportive, connecting environment, where in LD that's all they're there for (though they connect in the process). Think of it as getting "just the facts ma'am!" Some steps to focus your thinking: (a) try to formulate a mission statement for your project with your DH that expresses YOUR needs with respect to OUTCOME in the long term. People will tell you to make an overall plan before starting, but you don't have the knowledge yet to do that. So just try to establish a direction. I jumped to "nestle into the site" from what you originally posted, but maybe that isn't quite right. Talk about what effect you want to achieve. It can be kind of vague, like "just look normal" or "less bare", "ground the house" or "balance the house," as long as it sets up a bit of an idea in your head that you agree on. Just to give some perspective, other people might say "wrap the house in a naturalistic woodland" or "vegetable gardens as far as the eye can see" or " a place to organize my collection of irises." Or they'll want a formal Italian or Versailles type of garden. Or "Sleeping Beauty's castle." You may need to look at pictures and read books to name your objective. I find that negative identification helps too - seeing a hundred examples that you reject can help you narrow down what you DO want. This will also help you distinguish relevant advice from useless advice. (b) establish what is most important to you THIS YEAR. I went to foundation planting because it sounded to me like both you and DH are currently thinking pretty close to the house. It also sounds like you're focussed on the front. This means you have to ignore everyone, including me, who talks about stuff you aren't ready to do, like planting trees, which may be smart, but if your heart's not in it and you're not ready, leave it for even a year. Besides, you've already done some of that, so good stuff. I was going to mention that mail-ordered plants are small but my fingers were wearing out. But (if they survived) ou're going to look up one day and realize you already have some respectable-size trees. (c) decide whether you can do it yourself or have to get help. The issue of symmetry points out something quite interesting about landscaping: it can be tricky to achieve even a pretty generic effect when the house is unconventional or atypical in some way. What form of help? Why not start with the forums, as it's a format you enjoy and that leaves you in charge of your project. Hire someone later if you still feel out of your depth. But you won't know till you try. (d) when you are doing it yourself, understand that you are on a learning curve and you will make mistakes. Everything you do will teach you something, whether it works or not. Getting one plant and putting it in the ground is like painting a patch on the wall rather than just walking around with paint chips. That's why there is nothing wrong with letting DH go ahead with the planting he has in mind already, so you have something in the ground to step back and look at, and watch grow. I think that Wellspring's comment about impact will hit home immediately: he'll plant it, step back and go "I need more." Then the process of figuring out WHAT more is needed will be done with a better understanding of how things look in place. ANd if the hostas start to burn in the sun (and southeast, they will), you can dig them up and move them to the north side (just catch them before they actually die). If the roses look boring up close, head back to the nursery and look for something that scratches the itch that they leave you with. Plants will probably die at some point, they always do. I think I've killed one of every plant I have before succeeding with them. Some thoughts to hold onto: (a) there is no "right" answer to how to landscape this house, or any others in terms of either OUTCOME or PROCESS. Landscaping is done for the people in the house, not for the house. Put ten different families in that house, and you'd have ten different landscapes, all of them just fine. (b) the most important thing going on in any house is the relationships inside it. Never sacrifice a relationship to get a plant or rock put in what you think is the right place. (c) unless you pour concrete, there is nothing in landscape design that is irreversible. See (b). I'm not going to answer all your questions right now , partly because I think you need to forget about picking trees for now to do what matters more to you, the front foundation planting. I will just clarify that yes, rhodos are rhododendrons, and a V-groove is just a way of edging a planting bed - ignore that for now as you don't need to think that far ahead. And try doing an image search for "rockery" and I think you'll see right away what I mean. But I will add that the point about deer is EXCELLENT. I keep forgetting about them. If you have them, you might like to be prepared to think about whether or not you want to fence the house off at all. See you on LD! KarinL

Haha, yeah we have to reseed every year. It also doesn't help we have squirrels and some sort of creature that constant digs holes to get under the deck. A turf lawn in this area would be seen of as something completely out of place, we are very rural. Even the local high schools still have grass. We are working on a moss lawn in the fenced area, but it's slow going, We are focusing on the part that cannot be seen from the road. but is seen by every person that comes to the house. The house cannot be seen from the road at all except for in the winter, and even then it's obscured by so many trees you can't see it very well. The rocks are mainly because my husband wanted to put rocks everywhere, and I talked him into just there. Also, I'm not completely positive we can actually grow anything under there, let alone add rocks or a ground cover at all, so that is something we have to look into at a later time. The ground there is a ridge and furrow setup with netting. We had an issue with water seeping into the basement along one part of that area, but that was solved with laying plastic and adding another drain. The well is directly under the screened porch. Would planting a tree that close be an issue? The existing tree in the image is about 25' from the well cap.

I would not call liriope flat (as a pancake) as some of it can get 2' or more tall, depending on the variety one uses. With its rounded shoulders, full in a bed, it presents more like a stuffed cushion. Embothrium, my most vocal critic, says that he would do pretty much the opposite as whatever it is that I do (apparently at all times as he is compelled to bring this up ad infinitum.) The easiest and most obvious way for anyone to judge whether they like his, or my scheme better, is if he would at some time show his ideas in a graphic format. This could be a drawing like I do, or it could be a photo of any real-life example. But he seems never to want or allow this comparison to be made. As a firm believer in low maintenance landscapes, I think it is imperative that one chooses plants to physically fit the situation. If that situation happens to be in front of a window, then choose a plant that either has a 3' or 4' height limit to its growth, or that is slow enough in growth that it is easy to keep at that size. I can't think of a simpler way to think about solving that problem. Another advantage to coordinating shrubs with windows is that it eliminates the need to smother the entire house front in vegetation, as seems to be the defacto American residential landscape standard. If security is an issue, plants in front of windows, possibly with thorns, prevent their immediate access by undesirables. Hopefully, some day, instead of just speaking about it in a self-righteous tone, Embothrium will actually show us how much better his strategies are.