Oh! They look just like the giant round yews I used to have on the corners of my house. One yew in the yard was removed after we moved in by my very useful DH and I hemmed and hawed and thought about what to do with the others since I didn't want to see DH destroy his back. Well, I finally decided that I didn't want huge bare spots next to the house and have to put something else there anyway. So I went with the major trimming and I really like the result. HERE'S WHAT I DID: I would NOT recommend cutting them back to 2 feet even though eventually they will grow back. The trimming can be done in stages so you are not left with a bare stump. 1) You can cut back the bush hard all over as far as the green goes to leave some green showing. I did this first. Yours look much too tall like mine were. 2) Then, if you look inside the yews, you can see that there is basically a trunk with radiating branches and the green is mostly on the ends of the branches. What I did was to trim off all the lower radiating branches and leave the top of the bush green. The result will be a vase shaped bush. I wanted to make mine narrower to keep off the house siding and because they were blocking the path. The trunk and branches are actually quite attractive and the top can be rounded or shaped naturally or done like topiary if you want. This left a lot of room underneath the bush where I can plant bulbs or anything else. The yew roots don't seem like they are too thick or shallow for other plants. This will let you keep the shrubs, make them smaller, trim them away from the house, and plant more plants in front of them. If you would like a photo, email me and I'll see if I can figure it out. I just dropped in on this forum for a minute, but had to respond. Susan

HI Erin! Welcome to the wonderful fun of gardening and also, bless you in your new home! Where are you located? Are you thinking of only planting hostas or are you thinking of having a few other plants in there with them? Some contrast and especially color when the hostas are not blooming makes everything look really nice. Hostas are quite happy to have friends among them. My lot is .1 acre and that includes the house. So I do not not get hundreds of hostas or anything else (except slugs). It is pretty shady from my neighbors' trees though the bed in front of the house is in full sun. That is where daylilies and irises go. But I do have at least 25 cultivars of hostas and am planning some more. The advantage to a small garden is you have to plan what you put in it -- or else be prepared to pull out things to give away so you can make room for new acquisitions. And divisions from your older plants! The fun is, you don't get everything at once that you will ever have. Wait a while and put things in a few at a time (annuals will do to fill in places) and then you can have the pleasure of learning about new species and cultivars and acquiring them as the years go by. You will get different plants, hostas or otherwise, from various sources and they will always remind you of the person who gave it to you, swapped with you, or the trip you took when you bought one or another plant(s). I like to have some color spotted here & there so I use impatiens (I can hear the perennial people groaning) and I also have some Heron's Pirouette perennial begonias---these get about 2.5-3" tall when they bloom and have long lasting scapes ( flower stalks), arching gracefully --- here, from Aug till frost. In May, there is old fashioned bleeding heart -- both white and pink/white. These die back in the heat of summer so the hostas, which are getting big, fill in the bare spots the bleeding hearts left. I have a few liriope here & there because they are OK with dry shade & tree roots, and they are not boring if you only use a couple. You can get them with several shades of variegated foliage, and white or medium or dark blue flowers. And they bloom in very late summer/fall when not much else does, in the shady garden. I live in NJ overlooking the Delaware R just north of Trenton. I use astilbe, too--from white to pink to deep red frothy flowers in late spring and early summer. They are also beautiful with the hostas. Right now there are crocuses that have just opened yesterday (when it was sunny) and there will be squills and grape hyacinths, and daffodils are in the sunnier spots. I don't bother with tulips---though I love them, they are an expensive way to feed deer. I have lily of valley under the Norway spruce tree (which has had its lower branches removed to give sun to the bed under it) this is a rather dry shade bed---however the trunk of the spruce is ringed with Gold Standard hostas that are quite happy. The bed gets compost thrown over it every spring and it has sweet woodruff in there along with the hostas, and little spring bulbs such as crocuses & squills, and bigger ones ie English bluebells. Lily of the valley would like to take over the world, but there is easy way to stop it---dig some out. After it blooms, so you can have the wonderful flowers! I try to always have something blooming somewhere in the yard. It does not have to be a lot, just a bit--some white or pink flowered thing next to a dark leaved hosta brightens the corner. I have scilla Hispanica which is "wood hyacinths" -- you can get them in pink, white or blue, and they are very shade tolerant. They will bloom in May (here) and do very well next to hostas too. When the hosta leaves get bigger, the scilla is dying back for the summer. In our yard we have red shale which breaks down to clay in some parts, and what the locals call "the brown sand" in the other areas. In one little lot! Some kind of interesting geology was going on here a long time ago! We now have dark black soil over both, after years of digging in manure, leaves, & compost. You can ameliorate clay quite a lot with gypsum. We dig our yard's leaves right into our beds, around the plants, in fall. When we make a new bed, which we did a lot of after we got the new septic system, we take three years to do this digging, instead of planting things right away. The soil in those beds is wonderful. We also have a compost bin in the back corner---this is not rocket science and do not let compost hobbyists scare you! All you have to do is make a circle a yard or more across with sturdy wire, and throw in the leaves, weeds, and the non-meat kitchen scraps. Also grass clippings if you do not put weed killer and poisons on the lawn. Kitchen stuff meaning plant material such as peels, rinds, stems, leftover salad or other veggies that waited too long in the fridge to be eaten, and cut up toilet paper rollers. Turn it twice a year and when you turn it, take the well-composted stuff out & use it in your garden. When the ground is warm in summer, we just take the kitchen compost bowl out & dig the stuff right into the garden next to the plants. It breaks down very quickly in summer and the nutrition goes right into the plants. You said you have children---by all means, set aside a place for their own garden! Especially if you can make it in a sunny area. Let them plant veggies (then they will eat them) and make it easy ones such as lettuce and beans. You can grow beans as a little tent to save space. Or you can make a taller "tepee" with poles and leave an opening for the kids to crawl in under the beans. You can take a potato from the farmer's market (the organic stand; it won't have been sprayed with anti-sprouting stuff) and cut it up so the pieces have eyes. Just stick them in the ground a few feet apart. Then the kids can have their own potato plants. Well, you have heard enough from me! Once again, welcome to years & years of great fun!

I am going to get on my design high horse and probably offend some people who personalize discussions about design theory, because I am good at annoying people in this way. First, I think almost anybody who buys a post war house in almost any part of the country that was not built as a completely custom house is probably going to end up with a lot of choices in houses that include a patch of brick or stone on the front facade and plain siding or plainer brick on the rest. Almost anybody who builds a new house in a development or subdivision or home owner's association is not only going to face the same, thing, but in addition are not going to be allowed to leave the stone or brick accent off even if they want to. The element that was originally used as a budget cutting device is now "important" to the design and consistency of the entire development. The consistency of materials of the individual house is no longer important, but the inconsistency of materials and how they are used must be consistent throughout the neighborhood. The building a house forum is full of questions about how to tack the stone or brick onto the front of their houses even if they don't want it because the guidelines say the house must be 10% stone and 30% brick on the facade. Second, I don't think there is anything the matter with vinyl siding. I don't think there is anything the matter with any particular building material. Frank Lloyd Wright built beautiful houses out of concrete block. There's nothing the matter with building a plain rectangular house with plain modest materials that go all away around the house and calling it done. But as a culture we have been convinced that this is cheap looking somehow. But if its three sides of a rectangle with a convoluted elevation on the front including three or four different building materials, it's "pretty". Third, if you are building a custom or semi custom house, why not build something that you can afford to finish the same on all four sides? We are also in a culture where people are pressured into feeling it's necessary to take everything to a level that we can just barely afford it. And who is that impressing? Some random stranger may be impressed by your house driving by, but what about the people who get inside, and see that there's barely any furniture, and many of the rooms are cheaply detailed drywall boxes. I understand if you live in a HCOLA that it is easy to be house poor, but whats the point of a 4000 square foot house when you are entertaining people on card tables. Sheer volume isn't everything. Should you apologize to friends because the back of your house is vinyl? I dunno, but think about where you are putting friends and family. There is this fancy facade out front that no one ever spends any time in front of. They are escorted to the back yard. There are $1M townhouses here that have stone and brick facades with genuine copper bays and details on the front. The end unit has plain stucco on the side that faces a side streets. The backs are vinyl siding (you can easily see all three materials together.) So some stranger sees the fancy front of the house where the real friends are taken out back where they sit on crudely built pressure treated decks next to vinyl siding with all sorts of PVC pipes and vents and such sticking out all over with no concerns about esthetics, or quality, and it's all right at eye level. As a culture, maybe we should apologize.

Here's a pic showing our faux rafter tails. Not the best pic, but you get the idea. I remember now why closed soffits are required in some areas- fire prevention. Almost all of the outside materials on our house are fire-resistant, offering some small comfort living in the woods during an extreme drought.