I am far from an expert in this area, but since I recently purchased a new home and I am still trying to sell my old home I might be able to add something. The best advice is probably to spend as little as you can on your landscape. Spending $200 to spruce up your yard might be worthwhile, but $1,000+ is a waste. Somebody will purchase your home because of its location, the number of bedrooms, the layout, the number of baths, the neighborhood, and similar features. They will not purchase your home for the landscape. So why spend any money on your landscape? The reason is that potential buyers want the impression that they are purchasing a house that has been loved and maintained. If they notice a dozen problems before they even get to the front door, then they will look for other problems. Another reason is the real estate buzz word "curb appeal". The front of your house will be the fist thing shoppers see when they drive by or search on the Internet. Looking at the pictures, I agree that you should make some improvements to your landscape (provided that the inside of the house is in good shape). I would likely not remove anything that was not dead or in real bad shape. Prune back the overgrown shrubs, get some grass in there, get rid of the weeds, spread some mulch and straighten up. Removing the lower limbs from the spruce would open up the front of your house. You are not going to be able to create a dream landscape on a tight budget in just a few weeks, so do not try. - Brent

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.

The house is small, but it has a lot of mass with the solid walled porch. I would consider "window boxes"the full length of it to break up the mass and add some depth. My opinion is that if you convert the entire space to planting, it will make the house look more connected to the street. I think framing it in and making a space out of it will do more than displacing the space with all plants. Lawn, contrary to a new anti-lawn agenda talking points, is not there for no reason at all. It holds space - usable space. It also creates foreground and contrast to give shape to your plantings. I'd rather see you distract background views of the neighboring houses and draw the eye into your space. I know that there is a big anti-lawn agenda that is driving a lot of environmentally conscious people into tearing up their lawns and making more messy plantings and erosion problems than beautiful landscapes and clean air and water. This is a very basic and very typical landscape. Little hedges and the trees with colorful underplantings frame in the space. Colorful basic planting at the porch helps form the space. Window boxes down play the stark wall of the porch. Traditional plantings, even lawns, have evolved because when they are done well, they do several positive things. Boring? Maybe more predictable, but not necessarily boring or exiting. Clean, pleasant, and more usable and versatile than filling a square bed containing a hodge-podge of plants. A small front lot full of plants with a driveway on either side is going to become periferal planting to the driveways more often than not. The eye will go to the driveways in those cases. Its a cute house (in a nice way) that should be celebrated and accented rather than mitigated. Certainly, there are people out there who can make great things in this space that will work on every level, but these typically become a mess when most people attempt them for the first time.

Check out this video by Rosalin Creasy, the queen of edible landscaping. She also has a Web site. Then follow any links from there. You'll find a lot of inspirational photos and resources online. Yaardvark's basic design can be followed, you just need to figure out edible plants with the shapes he has drawn that thrive in your zone. I'm not that up on edible weeping plants, but lots of big shrub-shaped edible fruits and there are also fruit trees that have a columnar shape (column shape) such as sentinel apple trees. Raspberries and blackberry tend to get droopy and weepy-ish shaped (fountain shaped). There are edible easy to maintain groundcovers too, like lingonberry, although they need acid soil to thrive so you may have to amend. I grew bearberry which also goes by the name kinnikinnick as a groundcover. It is not really "edible" so much as medicinal, where it goes by the name Uva ursi. Lots of herb ground covers like thyme and chamomile and some low growing mints. There's also wintergreen but that needs shade and can be fussy. Not too much in the way of edible evergreens although you can grow balsam or fraser fir in some zones and collect the needles for their scent and oil. With juniper you can harvest the berries and make gin. Some junipers are columnar. Some make good groundcover, a fairly common low maintenance option for small yards. Edited to add that you're going to have to be thoughtful about planting your front yard since most edible plants like sun or partial sun, and your sun is going to be filtered at best. Try not to plant things in the shade of other things, so watch where the shadows fall during a whole day at different times.