Do not start another post just add to this one there is IMO nothing more irritating than duplicate posts on the same subject. I think the bones of the landscaping is nice just needs a clean up. I think I would start with the stuff on either side of the walkway it needs to be a bit lower for sure . I like a walkway that comes from the street to make the front door more welcoming and obvious. I think I would be tempted to hire an actual gardener to help with this . Or a landscape architect that can help clean it up . A lot of work went into this so be careful with what you do. I actually love the overall look and the repeat of the same materials is a nice choice IMO. & yrs is a long time for a garden to not really be tended so be gentle.

Agree, would be worth it to hire a professional b/c you have so many lovely plantings here. The only thing I'd want to change are the shrubs near the house - sort of looks a bit crazy with all the different heights. Maybe a calmer grouping of foundation plants. Everything else is absolutely gorgeous. Maybe you have some good transplanting opportunities, too, since it is so lush. Perhaps other parts of the property could use some of these plantings.

Patricia, sorry I meant adding it here as a separate comment. I absolutely want to keep all discussion in the same place. I agree that we want to work with the pallet that is there and improve upon it.

I agree that duplicate posts are not good, but this post is about an overall property. And there is not a battery of discussion here that needs to be preserved. It gets confusing discussing front, back sides all on the same post. I'd start a new thread that focuses strictly on one area only. Likely it would be the front. I'd also like to suggest that you take photos in a specific way so that we can see well what you have. Take a look at the third photo from top, where the camera is lined up with the front door. That axis is perfect, but the camera is too far away for us to see detail of the foundation planting, and how the entrance approach works. (I have no idea how one gets to the front door.) Move closer with the camera so that you can see the roof of the house and about 1 or 1 1/2 car length distance of ground. And stay at that spot for all pictures of this scene. (For tall houses, it works better to turn the camera sideways and use e the vertical format.) Take a series of slightly overlapping pictures that pan from far left to far right ... far enough that the neighboring houses show as background, as we need to see the setting. (Your landscape should be integrated with it and responding to it.)

Additionally, it good to get a more distant picture of the OVERALL front yard that includes its front corners. It's best to take the picture from across the street. If the front corners won't fit in a single picture, use the panning of slightly overlapping pictures, as described above, to capture the complete scene.

If you are going to start another thread, it would be good to do it ASAP ... before the discussion starts loading up on this thread. And link the other thread here, too, in order that people can get there easily.

Dilemma 1: Left side of front planting bed and where to put a concrete planter

One of the areas that we want to take on this year is the front perimeter planting bed from the front door to the left out to the corner of the sun room. This area is particularly unfinished and disorganized. It appears to be a mix of plan tings left over from the owner before the previous, some areas that were cleared out and never replanted, and a random collection of new plantings.

First a photo as it looks today before all of the hostas have grown up:

From left to right, there's a nice ornamental on the corner. I'm not completely sure what it is but it flowers white in the early spring and produces red berries in the fall. It has a bunch of scraggly undergrowth shrubs that we plan to replace. Moving north, this single large yew is one of four that used to frame the corners of the house and flank the front door. It's the only one that's left but I think we want to keep it. Next is a cluster of various evergreen shrubs surrounding and hiding the concrete planter. Then lastly is a grouping of azaleas surrounded by hostas that we also want to keep.

We have some time to figure out the landscape this spring (and Covid-19 has given us all the more time to figure this out). But there is a large three tier concrete planter that has sunk into the ground right in the center of the bed that will need to be dealt with sooner. Our landscapers are available to move and/or level it within the next week or two to move it, and it is so heavy that we do not want to move it twice.

With that in mind we have come up with two options for it's location:

Option 1 leaves the planter where it is centered between the windows and removes or relocates much of what's in front of it balancing out the azaleas with more to the left with a couple flanking arborvitae for a symmetrical vignette.

Option 2 plays off the more dynamic play of objects right of the door, using the logic that the matching planter over there isn't centered so why should this one be, and nestles the planter in the front among the hostas instead with a large mounding shrub of some sort taking the current place of the planter.

A second topic of discussion is what to do up against the house. If you look at the original un-doctored photo in my first post, there are three 8' tall arborvitae against the house on the right side of the door and nothing on the left side. I'd like to see a consistent row of something up against the house as a neutral backdrop that emphasizes the house's horizontal lines, and unless they get topped off I can see the arborvitaes overwhelming the house in 10 years. My SO thinks we need more height back there and thinks we should plant arborvitae on this side to balance it out. Either way, whatever we do on this side along the foundation we plan to do on the other.

We are in Northwest Indiana, on the edge of zones 5b/6a. The front of the house faces east. The sun room corner at left is southeast. The big trees in the front yard shade the lawn but the perimeter beds still get sun from the south from mid morning until the shadow of the house starts to stretch across them in mid afternoon.

Your house reminds much very much of my previous house! One issue I had was the yews at each corner and both sides of the porch. Unfortunately, the corner trees weren't planted exactly the same relative position to the house. Then the yew on the north side of the porch didn't grow evenly as that side had the porch downspout dumping too much water. I removed almost all the yew bushes...once I got started, it looked so nice I kept going. I love symmetrical designs but eventually gave up because I wasn't disciplined enough to cut back the thriving plants and prune carefully to keep it looking even.

I inherited tons of hosta plants which hadn't been divided in years so I had plenty of raw material. After splitting some larger clumps, I would dig a long trench, pull the rest apart into smaller plants and misc roots and just lay them out down the row. For the first year I would put in some annuals so it didn't look so bare but the next year it started to look nice and the following years was a nice even line along the sidewalk and driveway. Sometimes I would just throw the little bits and pieces at the outside of the compost pile to grow while I decided where I wanted to tackle the next year. I tried to save my money to buy plants I didn't already have rather than spending money on the large quantities needed for a big yard.

I know you will have some very concerns with the landscaping as you will want it to be so very right. Part of the problem with owning such a neighborhood showpiece is all the critics come out of hiding when you start doing anything past pulling a weed or two.

I can only conclude that we're not going to get any good pictures. Oh well.

Ooo your yard would be fun to work on! I wouldn't be any help, as we're sort of fly by the seat of our pants with our landscaping, nowhere near as perfect and formal as what you've got. It's beautiful tho, I hope you post a lot more pictures.

Yardvaark, it has been raining much of yesterday and today, but even then I can take more but it is late March and nothing will be leafed out yet.

the entrance path turns north and ends in a short run of steps down to the driveway which then leads out to the street. I can tell from historic aerials that the path has always done this. That and the more asymmetrical arrangement of the trees in the yard suggest the front yard was always imagined as a less formal park setting than the strict symmetry of the house.

Lyndee Lee, it sounds like you are advocating balance over symmetry as I agree that keeping everything the same size and shape is a lot of effort of not impossible. That’s also why I think having 6 arborvitae across the front of the house isn’t such a good idea. A row of shrubs, not trimmed into a hedge seems like it would be easier to keep looking good.

Another thing I am considering and will hopefully become clear with additional photos is that the house is set 100 feet off the sidewalk and 125 feet off the street. So the area that we are currently considering is primarily viewed from afar on the sidewalk, from the side on the front path, or from behind in the house.

If more organization and symmetry is your goal -- a less "busy" vibe, one beginning project might be to move all the Hosta and use them and only them to outline your driveway and/or walkway. They reproduce and spread and thicken and may be ready to be thinned anyway.

"Yardvaark, it has been raining ..." Pictures need to be taken in good lighting so we can see what's there.

"... but it is late March and nothing will be leafed out yet." Doesn't matter. May be preferable for allowing something behind to be seen instead of blocked by foliage ... requiring more guessing on our part.

An overall direction I'd lean is toward simplification. Instead of competing for attention with the architecture, I believe that landscaping should reinforce and enhance it. Rather than a hedge underscoring a large section of the building (as is seen in your plan above), I'd limit shrubs to windows, and see two options: 1) one window per one shrub, or 2) a pair of windows per one shrub, an even simpler finished product. (I'm not saying that one shrub will literally underscore a pair of windows, but that the finished product appears as one shrub. It might be made of two or three.) Another reason to scale down the number of shrubs, besides visual simplicity and avoiding the house looking engulfed by them, is to create a much lower maintenance requirement.

For this illustration keep in mind that it is conceptual, and since we don't have a good picture of the whole house, it's based to a large extent on fiction. From the picture used I have no idea what's happening at the right side of the house. I'm just making up stuff based on the other side of the house. Nevertheless, you can see the shrub/window concept. Things that are not shrubs would likely be perennials, groundcover and annuals. There seems to be a fair amount trees surrounding the house so even small ones don't seem likely to be needed in the foundation planting. I thought the 3-tiered planter conflicts too much with the background where you have it. In front of the sun porch seems like a bit roomier place for it.

For the future, you need to develop an understanding of shrub trimming, including acceptable shapes for shrubs. Almost nothing in the landscape looks worse than a scraggly "shrub" on jagged little "stilts"... where all the lower foliage is gone. It doesn't at all have to be this way if standard shrub pruning practices are adhered to.

I love the current garden

I have to say I do too. I'm sure edits would improve it but in general I like the overall low plantings that reveal the magnificent entryway (perhaps even lower would be better), the vertical accents, and the curving sweep of the bed. I wouldn't rely on hosta too much for such a visible area because for much of the year (in my zone 6b) it's bare earth.

If you're in Indiana, you should plant some Quinine plants (they're native there) for the next round of CV-19. Make yourself some tinctures. Love the landscaping, except for the random taller evergreens and the over abundance of hostas. Transplanting will save some money to spend on a landscape designer who can help get rid of overgrown and poorly maintained plants so new ones can be brought in.

Stunning house, I also love the current garden!

I like the concrete planter between the windows but think you should bring it forward a bit.