Selection of evergreens depends mostly on what you have available, if you are going to buy locally. Otherwise you can mail order but you have to do a heck of a lot of research to figure out what to order and where to get it. So for plant selection, your best bet is to visit your local nurseries and look around, buy what you like, and then arrange it to please you when you get home. You can always leave space for more shopping trips later in the season as nurseries get new stock all spring and summer, sometimes also in fall. If you don't like just shrubs, of course you can augment them with perennials, but I do agree a shrub presence is called for beside the garage. Perhaps you'll come to enjoy and appreciate shrubs once they are in the right places. As for your front door, I think your layout is very cool, very convenient and frankly more attractive than seeing the garage door from the street. The little garden beds the driveway leaves you can be filled with a better selection of plants and would be quite attractive. Because the porch is dark I suspect it will be most pleasant if you keep the plants in front of it low, and having perennials there will give you something to watch change over the seasons as you come and go. What you do to the right of the door depends on how much work you want: The least work is extending the grass all the way in, or you can have garden all the way along the house. There I also think what matters most is what you want to see when you come home or hang out in the yard. Deciduous shrubs will only work if you prune them as you would with coloured twig dogwoods, as most will lean out from the house toward the light. Evergreen plants do this less (and conifers least of all) but I don't see that you need a lot of bulk there, so a perennial garden wouldn't be the worst thing there either. You probably get snow in winter and have to clear the driveway so a garden alongside it that goes dormant might not be the worst thing at all. KarinL

Where do you live? Zone "5" can be moist, dry or muggy. NW can be a tricky exposure - too shady some seasons and too hot and sunny others ... I would: 1 - Remove the teensy black fencing 2 - Remove the flat-topped shrubs under the windows. Someone thought they could have a green foundation hedge there and didn't take proper care of it so it's badly shaped. Whatever you replace it with should have a mature height that is not more than the height of the windows so you don't have to prune. 3 - If the budget allows, widen the walk so it's as wide as the steps (I HATE SKINNY WALKWAYS!) 4 - Although not as exuberantly as ideashare showed, I would use the full front yard ... houses with a flat expanse of grass and a skinny fringe of "foundation plantings" look stand-offish to me. Your "welcome to my house" landscaping should start at the sidewalk. 5 - Consider some sort of arbor or pergola over the front door, with a non-invasive vine on it, to soften the rather boxy front. If zoning permits, of course. It could be as simple as a free-standing post and crossbeam, or a full-up 4-post pergola with roof beams and lattice sides.

I confess, I am not seeing any rhyme or reason to the plan, other than "here are some nice shrubs." The forms don't complement the slope itself. They will be shrubs sticking up on a slope. You will not buy huge specimens and they will not grow at the same rate so ultimate heights and blending doesn't seem a sure thing. The shrubs won't provide enough erosion/weed control; if ivy is to be the basis of groundcover/erosion control, plugs should be set throught the shrub area, too, though it may not go with the shrubs (competes?)and/or the shrubs might be superfluous (dark green laurels sticking up out of dark green ivy). How is the vinca and ivy going to be integrated/compete. If you aren't terracing, wouldn't it almost be better to acknowledge the slope but have a pretty, green slope or a few contrasting greens("my house is at the top of a hill, by doggies, so use the steps!")? Perhaps use just a whole lot of groundcover--this could be explored further as to type;; I don't recall sun/water conditions--vinca for flowers? Ivy for sun/shade/drought/indestructible? Both good for uniform green color, cheap, fast spread. Carpet junipers? Daffodil idea is great for breakthrough color, no maintenance. Focus a few small trees or largish shrubs somehow related to what needs to be accomplished at stair way or other "focal" or grounding points (someone help me here, I am out of my league, other posters already said this.) These ideas are already in the above posts but the great thing about your posted plan is that to me it illustrates how those alternatives would be preferable. Don't mean to appear so negative and without precise alternatives. You DO have a plan. Maybe it is providing more important form and color interest than I can see. But it strikes me as very cookie cutter, foundation-ish and not really slope- or function- oriented. If somehow you could photoshop the same image with more of the down-flowing, uniform groundcover, correct color (not brown mulch, though mulch would be needed for the first couple of years) and the focal points I think the difference in "feel" would be more obvious. Youu would put divide your budget into LOTS of groundcover pots and a few specimens. Your existing shrubs could probably be configured in somehow for grounding. Either way you will have mulch/watering/weeding for several years until established. Can you "work" with the person who did your plan, saying, how 'bout something more like this....? Anyway, just think how much farther along you are in your thinking, planning, evaluating. Hopefully, it's all heading toward the ultimate goal of a plan that works best for you.

The lawn is the easy part. Post this picture in the Lawn Care forum to get a head start. It is likely too late to do a great renovation, but you could drop a mix of fescue, rye, and Kentucky bluegrass as a start. But lets start with the soil. You probably hate it. If you think you need more topsoil, you don't. If anything I might be inclined to remove some of the crown in the yard to improve drainage toward the street. With a basement the last thing you want to do is create a dam that backs up rain and melting snow into the house. If you look at the bricks on the house, there should be a bottom brick. The bottom of that brick is the sill of the house. Measure down 4 inches and that is where the top of the soil should be. If you have soil higher than 4 inches below the sill, then consider removing some. I see houses every day where the owners have brought in topsoil to "improve" the soil. That doesn't work. New soil is not better soil. Regardless of whether you remove soil or leave it all, it can be improved. This soil looks desiccated which is very hard on the microbes in the soil. It is the microbes that develop a healthy soil. Get 2 hoses, 2 turbo-type oscillator sprinklers, and a Y type splitter for your hose faucet. Also get a hose end sprayer that has a bottle for applying liquids. Put about 4-5 ounces of shampoo into the sprayer bottle and fill it with water. Spray the shampoo over the yard evenly until the bottle is empty. Then it is time to water that shampoo in. Arrange the hoses and sprinklers to cover the lawn on full sweep. Then put out tuna cans to catch the water around the yard. Time how long it takes to fill all the tuna cans. For my oscillator it takes 8 full hours, so you're in this for awhile. If you see runoff at any point, immediately stop watering and let the moisture soak into the soil for 15 to 30 minutes. Then restart the watering and the timer. Stop as often as needed to prevent runoff. When the cans are full stop the timer. The time on the timer is the time you will be watering in the future unless or until you install underground sprinklers. The shampoo followed by the deep watering is all you need to do to reawaken the soil microbes. If you want to make them really happy, apply an organic fertilizer. Organic fertilizers feed the microbes and keep your soil healthy. This will give your yard a huge boost for whatever grass or planting you do in the future. Once you have an inch of water in the soil, that might be the last time you need to water this year. You should see the existing grass respond as well as old and new weeds. That is all good. If you do not seed grass this fall, like immediately, you should know that spring is a poor time to seed new grass. Why? Because spring is when the summer annual weeds are sprouting. Crabgrass is the main culprit, but there are others. Fall is better simply to avoid those weeds. But if you do seed in the spring, just know that everything can be fixed next August when you seed again. Lawn care is as easy as watering (properly), mowing, and fertilizing. Watering is easy enough with the oscillators, so don't get excited about spending thousands on an in-ground system. You won't need to mow until you have grass. For now a string trimmer would work wonders. I've "mowed" my entire lawn with a string trimmer, so it can be done. As for fertilizing, apply any organic fertilizer at 15-20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. That helps the soil which help the plants. Read some posts on the Lawn Care forum and see if you want to get involved with that.