My sister and I and our DH's have been working on the landscaping and plants at both of our houses. Their style and ours are very different. My sister and I started walking in the mornings for a 1/2 hour 2 or 3 times a week, right after the kids go to school. One of the things we do is look at all the hardscaping and plantings in the yards we pass by and talk about what we like and don't like. Gives you lots of ideas to determine what you want and what grows well in our area. The next thing I would do is to interview your kids! Ask THEM if they could design and create that space, what would it be? What activities would they do there, what kind of plants do they like? What kind of furniture or decorations for it? You may get some very interesting answers! There are some good childrens' garden books and children's gardening books out there with lots of ideas. We did this when we started to plan, design and "imagine" the side yard "Secret Garden" we're creating with and for our two children. Our 10 yo son wants a pond and a rainbow flower garden, our 12 yo daughter wants a vegetable garden. They both want a place to read (they are both avid readers, we have no cable and no video games or nintendo here), and a space to play games like checkers, cards or chess.And a table and chairs so they can enjoy a snack outside in their garden and invite friends over to play in the garden. Both children said they wanted fragrant plants. We put in an arch and a birdbath to also further encourage and attract hummingbirds and butterflies. They want two ducks or a chicken too- we'll see! We already have a dwarf rabbit and a outdoor cat. I want a corgi, so like I said, we'll see! To see some pics of their Secret Garden in progress, check out my Picture Trail: careytearose Here is a link that might be useful: look in the Landscaping Projects 2007 album

There is an informal hierarchy of maintenance involved with various plants. Very generally, the larger a plant grows and the longer it lives, the less maintenance required. That would put trees at the top of the low maintenance list :-) Next comes shrubs and most particularly, evergreen shrubs, provided they are appropriately hardy for your location. Perennials tend to require a fair amount of maintenance despite the fact they return each year. Old foliage needs to be cut back and cleaned up, most will need routine division, some need staking and deadheading.......they can take up a lot of time and attention. And, they leave a blank slate for 4-6 months of the year when they are dormant. And annuals and edibles tend to require the most maintenance and attention, for obvious reasons :-) My personal design preference (and a rough rule of thumb many designers follow) is to have a front entry garden be as much evergreen as possible so that it looks relatively uniform throughout the year and not a big bare patch of soil in winter. So I would focus on small broadleaved evergreen shrubs and dwarf conifers suitable for the amount of sunlight and hardy in your area - consider dwarf boxwoods, compact or small leaf rhododendrons, dwarf abelia (Kaleidoscope', 'Radiance' or 'Mardi Gras'), dwarf pieris ('Cavatine' or 'Little Heath'), dwarf mugo pines or Hinoki cypress. You don't need this to be entirely evergreen - you could add a deciduous shrub or two or even a couple of clumps of whatever perennial you favor - but you want the majority of the plantings to have a year round presence. You can place something that gets a bit larger/taller in front of the solid brick portion if you like but I would keep the plant selection to only a few different species and cluster them or repeat them throughout the area to provide cohesiveness. And remember: larger, long lived and evergreen plants require less maintenance than short lived and non-evergreen ones :-)

It will not be possible to keep the sago palms in those locations if you want a welcoming approach to the entrance and an overall improved appearance to the yard. They, and as the plants below them, pinch off the entrance severely, making it suitable for a hobbit hole entrance. The walk is skinny and needs widening to the full width of the arch. If you can't do, consider widening, at least, the portion next to the stoop. If you can't do that, don't plant anything of any height there. Where the sagos are would be a better place for annuals for color. If you also want low annuals to extend in front of the other arch I think that would be OK. If you don't want annuals, consider low perennials so you have something there most of the year. If not perennials, a low groundcover. It's definitely past time to remove some lower limbs/branches of the oaks as they are concealing too much of home. I'm sure this would show up in a picture taken from farther back.

Bamboo is a great choice for containers!! And you do not need to restrict yourself to clumpers - running bamboo is easily contained in large tubs. Boxwood would also work but does grow remarkably slowly and would need to be sheared/trimmed to get the very sharp, clean look you seem to favor. Japanese holly is very similar in appearance and grows somewhat faster so that is a possibility as well, especially the cultivar 'Sky Pencil', which may naturally offer the look you like. Other narrow, columnar needled evergreens with a very restrained habit could work also - Cupressus sempervirens 'Tiny Towers', Cupressus macrocarpa 'Wilma Goldcrest', Juniperus communis 'Compressa', etc. If the phormiums are newly planted, you may very well have some hardiness issues. In the PNW it is not necessarily the cold in winter that knocks them back but rather the combination of cold and our typically winter wet soils. They require excellent drainage and/or a coastal location to really thrive in this area.