Wow - I had a personal emergency that took me away from my computer for a few days. When I logged on today and saw 43 replies, I just about choked on my toast. Who knew salt could be so controversial ;O) I want to say a HUGE thank you to those who have offered suggestions and pictures. I am a very visual person, and it helps so much to get a visual. And peonies happen to be my alltime favorite flower. LOVE the idea of shutters, and have hummed and hawed about adding them. Interesting thought. The canopy would be destroyed in one season, LOL! But it was fun to imagine. The more I think about window boxes, the more I am sure that they would come right off of the house, or get destroyed by flying snow, so I am loving the idea of planters under the windows, that I can put in the basement for the winter. I can't tell you how excited I am at the thought of planting a tree. This area has so much potential, which is why I bought this house. Unfortunately, it's up and coming....either that or I have made a bad investment, but time will tell. There have been a few people buy one of these houses and fix it up nice, but nothing that's really got a WOW factor, and I am going to be the first one to get that WOW factor. I think that the addition of a tree is going to help with that. Not one single house has a tree in the front yard, and it never even occured to me until I saw that mockup. I have spent the past year and a half since buying this house renovating the interior - gutting, rewiring, re-building, etc etc etc, - and have neglected the exterior completely (obviously, since the house numbers are just sort of leaning there, after being removed when the front door was replaced last year). I will be honest, I lost my enthusiasm about the exterior. When I posted my original request for suggestions, I wasn't excited about it.... I just wanted to get rid of the shrubs before the next snowfall starts. But I am excited now. I have 75% of the front dug up, and there is beautiful soil under the grass. I am going shopping for a tree!!! I have access to peonies - I still have digging rights at my old house, which has a huge garden yipee! As for salt, to be honest, the only time I think about salt is when I get fries at McDonalds and wonder what the heck kind of great deal they must get on salt. I have never planted anything this close to the street, so I have no idea if plants will be affected or not. The wiegela and spruce or cedar or whatever it is are not the least bit affected by it, or by that much snow believe it or not...surprised me too. I live in New Brunswick, Canada. Last year we had a LOT of snow, and it was my first winter here, so I don't know what this year holds ... but the front yard is still my only option for a place to blow driveway snow, and pile front walk snow. So it's still going to be a tough spot for plants. The good thing about perennials is that they will die back before the heavy snows come. Thank you again for the great input, ideas, and drawings!

Looking again at your diagram, I'm hoping that on the right side, the triangle by the little sidewalk is meant to be paved. If that is your car, I would do quite a lot of paving area, a landing pad if you will, perhaps with a bench or table to help with unloading the car - really expanding on as you've shown, or fully replacing, your little sidewalk. Focus on the shape of the paved area, it should be nicer than you've drawn. Your plants can be around that, but which plants they are is irrelevant at the moment, all that can be certain is that they will die from being stepped on if the area is not big enough! Plants will come and go over the years anyway; just get the paving right. Even if that is not your car, I would be surprised if neighbours did not step there. The left side can be your gardening extravaganza side since it doesn't have to be passage to anywhere. Just make paths of some sort through the planting areas. I would not worry about symmetry. The house is so symmetrical that nothing can "throw that off." And since the yard is already not symmetrical, I would simply ignore the issue. In a yard this size, the task is really what I call "microlandscaping" - meeting your needs at this spot, and that spot, with the outcome being the sum of the parts. My observation in my area of historic houses with tiny yards is that the overall effect is usually good. The house so overwhelms the space that the gardening can't alter the impact the house makes. So, in a bid to win the award for "worst sketch ever posted on the LD forum" I hereby submit a diagram of my postage-stamp front yard abutting a house very similar to yours, with a full-width elevated porch and central door. Please be clear that I am not recommending this, but just showing it as a model (if you can't be an inspiring example, be a horrible warning...). My space is really reflective of ME, and as we slowly approach the idea of selling it someday, I know I will be changing it a lot in order to sell it. When we bought the house, there was basically nothing, well, except for a flowering quince off to one side that was poised to consume most of my gardening time for the ensuing 5 years with first pruning and then removal. The "design" process has been incremental, marked by what were sometimes good ideas that did not work for the existing constraints, for example, a diamond-shaped patio on the right that we removed because it quickly got buried in debris from the neighbour's giant-and-growing conifer (now removed). This layout evolved partly in response to existing constraints and opportunities (one bed, for example, is where it is to incorporate a large shrub that I was not ready to remove), and partly as an actual design as we gained experience living in this space and learned what our needs were. To explain the diagram below, I've put in grey the lines of sidewalk as they originally were, and shaded in overtop in red what we did as paving instead. The green areas are the planting beds, and the white open space is simply mulched. The big circles denote the canopies of major trees and shrubs. There is a fence that I haven't shown. Also, out front is a public sidewalk, and a hellstrip before the street. To say it's crowded would be an understatement. With most of the plantings being shrubby or tall, the white areas are quite enclosed - and I think the drawing makes them a bit too big; other than the red patio it is not quite to scale. The small patio to the left makes an amazing difference for such a small adjustment. It gives me a space to "be" and to keep stuff in the front yard that is comparatively private, shielded by what I call the "isthmus" of plantings extending from the left property line. Converting that sidewalk to a patio also allowed me to enlarge the foundation bed on that side (yes, I do have foundation beds!) which I wanted to do because that seemed to be a place that my favourite plants thrived. The patio is just dry-laid 2'x2' slabs, some cut on the diagonal. All the beds are actually raised beds enclosed by boulders; My porch foundation is fortunately masonry so I can pile dirt against it, and I am on a bit of a side slope so the beds are built up to even that out. In real life, the whole composition is just a mass of canopy, but that is how I like it. My primary gardening interest is in foliage; the overlay of different leaves and the contrast among them, as well as in the up-close changes that plants go through, so being really immersed in the plants rather than seeing their shapes from a distance works for me. The driveway is not ours, by the way. Regarding your arch over the entryway, it might be relevant to mention that I have an arch "in effect" due to overhanging foliage that is actually an irritant. If I am standing on the porch, I can't make eye contact with someone standing on the sidewalk unless I bend down to look through the "arch." So when you have an elevated door, I would not recommend the arch, especially not with plants growing riotously over it. From the outside, the arch frames a view of the bottom half of the door or of your feet if you are there. We actually had to put our address on the top step (riser) because no one could see it above the door. I hope that helps for starters. You will develop your own garden personality and way of "being in the space" that will drive later decisions and amendments to whatever you do now. And in that process of discovery, for me, is the fun of home landscaping. And this is very different from owning a larger lot, although perhaps your back yard is bigger. On a small lot, you do tend to spend time in or use every corner, so nothing is really just for looking at - it is all about how you experience it. Karin L

Trying to make progress even though I'm using a temporary (for me) drawing program. My sketch is incomplete. We don't have a good idea of what the left or right front of the house looks due to being absent in the pictures or covered in shrubbery. Nevertheless this can cover some of the basic points. Sorry if I'm repeating myself or something someone else has already said but I don't want to re-read all. I would not bring planting bed alongside the walk toward the driveway. doing so will make the walk seem much smaller when in fact it would be better if it was wider. Too, it will add to maintenance and it will not look as good as if you had nicely edged turf there. A truth about turf is that it will not grow in too much shade. It's time to divide out those areas from the lawn where it won't grow and turn them into groundcover. I disagree with your idea of planting so many things -- 3 stripes of plants -- in front of the foundation. There simply isn't room and this busy scheme will not look near as good as a single plant in front of a given part of the foundation. Color fits flanking the entrance. A low evergreen shrub or groundcover could surround the bay windows and shrubs or low plantings could be farther away (this is the area we don't yet know.) We don't know what the condition of the lawn at the left side of front yard is either. If a tree is far enough away from the others and limbed up high enough that sufficient light gets below it, it's possible to grow grass. If otherwise, then it's not and that area should be sectioned for groundcover. A small (12'-15') multi-trunk tree (made of a large shrub) could be off the right corner of house.

Yes, I understand that the immediate intention for the play area is not to install a play set. But it's coming eventually and do you want the planting scheme to do dual duty by working now and also be ready for the future without any major alterations? Or do you want to subject yourself to the possibility of making a lot of changes when a play set is installed? A year is NOT a long time. As the play area develops, it is divided from the planting area with a bed line. The bed line is something to be figured out now, on the plan (as information about the play set/area becomes known.) The bed line divides places where people could possibly walk ("floors": lawn, low groundcover, mulch-only) from places where they couldn't ("walls" & "furniture": shrubs, perennials and tall groundcovers.) Trees ("ceilings") could be located in either areas Another possibility with the pitts is to cut them down and do a total rejuvenation -- where you control/shape their re-growth (which will happen very quickly since they already have developed root systems) -- and trim them so as NOT to reach way out into the yard. Let them grow as a much narrower hedge which is later trimmed into tree forms and reaches and screens above the fence. Based on some of the prior discussion, I'm going to speculate that one potential problem that could come up is not devoting enough depth to the planting beds (that are likely to surround most of the yard.) In general terms, this bed(s) ought to be allowed 6' depth as an average minimum. There are usually instances where it can easily be deeper, and possibly some instances where it can be shrunk to 4' when sacrifices must be made. Plants require space and trying to maintain a bed that is too skinny/shallow is not only difficult & more demanding of maintenance, but it doesn't look very good either. That's something to be mindful of.