Let's start at the beginning on the off chance that your house was sided with one of the various synthetic stuccos. In all your travails did anyone mention this to you? What you picture and describe I have seen first hand here in the south. The manufacturers of these products lost in a class action suit and have been forced to make repairs and install new siding at no cost to the home owner. Rotting window sills and a mold 'smell' are the first tip off's to this problem. Many thousands of homes just in the Wilmington, NC. area were repaired. Do a search for "class action suits + synthetic stucco" for more information. I am trying to remember another title to search with more definitive information. Perhaps someone can help out here.

Suggest you interview another designer, preferably a woman. I say this (running for cover) as usually it is women designers who understand grandmother's garden and the time constraints of little children.

I didn't even have the energy to read your whole story at your link but imagine you have even less energy left after actually living it. Wow.

From your posting, you are trying to make the landscaping project approximately the same magnitude as the house rescue was. Or you're so accustomed to working at that pace that you can't help yourself. But me, on reading your post my first instinct is to say "Whoa, Nelly!".

Can I point out first of all that all the memories you seem to have of your Grandmother's garden are of the garden in summer. Also, you have what I personally view as a regrettable attachment to deciduous plants :-) which lose their leaves in winter and as such are not well used as foundation planting.

Foundation planting is, I gather, your first priority, although you are also thinking about a vinca lawn (ummm... to that by the way), so obviously have some space "out there" too.

Here's what I would suggest you do.

If you want a cottage garden, do it away from the house. Indulge yourself to your heart's content in lilacs and peonies, but not where you depend on them to frame your house, because they will only do this for a very few months of the year. Your house can be surrounded by a cottage garden without the cottage garden having to be at the foundation.

Now consider foundation planting as a separate issue. How much do you really need? Lovely house, no ugly feet... and you might still want to get at those walls again if Nandina is right and the root cause of your problem is not yet solved (she usually is right, I'm afraid). Search this forum for threads about foundation planting and you may find that you need much less than you think. What you do install can certainly be jazzed up with perennial or annual colour, but should mostly be evergreen. I like yews and plum yews and rhodos for shady exposures myself.

Personally, I think I'd grass the whole property over for now or leave it mud if you get enough snow to cover it, and spend the winter planning the layout (that's first) and the plant selection (that's second).

nandina - actually, our house was traditional 3-coat cement stucco, it was just done completely wrong by a builder who had no clue what he was doing. We actually had one expert who flew up from Wilmington to assess our house - he was one of the guys that discovered the synthetic stucco problem. But the problem is not just confined to synthetic stucco - now that I've learned more than I ever wanted to about stucco and proper flashing practices, I see tons of houses around here that have (or are going to have) the same problems. Sad.

karin - The root problem is solved - we ripped every bit of stucco, sheathing, and insulation out of the house and had it down to studs and drywall. Everything that went back on was properly flashed and we took extra precautions such as a rainscreen to insure that water that gets behind the siding will be able to drain.

Your question of how much foundation planting we really need is a good one - that's why I was thinking more of perennials (ferns and hostas) along the front - if it dies back in the winter, so be it. I think the house looks much better with no landscaping than it did with the big overgrown bushes. I know that I definitely don't want the traditional yew, holly, and barberry bushes that everybody seems to have around here.

However, since you seem to know a lot about evergreens, can you recommend a few that won't grow much more than 3-5 ft tall and are very dense? I'd like to at least get the bushes in to screen the A/C units before winter as they're quite ugly. And I wouldn't mind one or two in the front just so it's not completely bare in the winter, but I'd want them to stay lower than the windows. I'm in zone 6 (think I forgot to say that in my first post). I do have to do something - we don't get a ton of snow and the lawn will be a muddy disaster if I don't get something done - it's only been a few weeks since the drainage work started and I'm vacuuming and cleaning floors about five times as much as I used to.

What don't you like about the vinca lawn idea? My landscaper isn't fond of it either, but that's because he told me he hates spending 3 days planting thousands of vinca plants. I don't mind if it spreads - I've got about 3 acres of lawn and another 2 of meadow (lawn I don't mow, basically), and I really want to add something else interesting to break up the sea of grass.

Unless it is in a fair amount of shade, vinca can't outcompete grass where you are. So instead of swish, swish with a lawnmower and it's done, you get to do pull, pull, pull, pull on your hands and knees to weed it out. And it's at least twice that much work before it gets established because you can't mulch it heavily because that will slow the groundcover down.

Let's just say that when I've seen it done successfully, there have been very large trees involved that provide a lot of shade. Grass wouldn't have grown there anyway.

You have a lot of area to deal with...much more than I will be able to give specific advice for. My suggestion to you is to stop thinking about plants. Don't think about the plants that you want and then figure out where you can squeeze them in. Instead think about what you want out of your landscape...where do you want to sit?...where do you want to stroll?...where will the kid/grandkids play?...what views do you want to soften/block/enhance/highlight?...then once you have some of the big picture items you and start to think about what plants you can use to achieve your goals.

Maybe it is getting late or maybe the beer is kicking in but after a few years of thinking about this stuff I have realized it matters much less what you plant than it does where you plant. I second karin's suggestion to spread $20 worth of grass seed for now and to think about it a bit more.

- Brent

Why don't I like the vinca lawn idea... well, I think the whole idea of alternate ground covers is vastly overrated, as a few other threads on this forum have indicated (search this forum for "ground covers" and I imagine you'd find them). Or maybe it's not so much overrated as romanticized.

There is a reason why grass has become the ground cover of choice over the past several hundred years. It's because it works best with minimal work, and it became dominant while scything, not riding mowers, were the tools available. Of course it was not the owners who did the scything, but I digress.

Most ground covers, and I think vinca in particular, begin by being too sparse (as madtripper says, too sparse for weed control but also for good looks), and then finally get the way you want them for about a year, and then they're too dense. And then you need to manage them somehow, or else you get a knee-deep, and eventually waist-deep, pile of dead vinca with live vinca just on top. It will be a haven for rodents if such frequent your area, and a place where cats go to die, but untreadable by humans, and probably also a fire hazard to boot. And how do you manage the vinca, if you wish to prevent this? You wade in and do it by hand... or by scythe? I suppose you could mow it at reasonable intervals, but isn't that what you're trying to avoid...?

Back to foundation planting. It isn't just their herbaceousness that makes me dislike peonies for foundation planting, but around big houses it's also a matter of scale. To me, peonies around the base of the house make it look as though the house was dropped from outer space and landed in the flower patch. Peonies are wall-accented with obelisks or birdhouses to my eye, but not by two-storey houses. Dwarf evergreens would be just as bad... again, rather than trying to place plants, establish what size and shape of foundation plant you want before identifying the actual plant.

On a more positive note, on a neighbouring thread a couple of other people have given what amounts to a good primer on landscaping from scratch, I've linked to that.

Speaking of scale, you do have a large chunk of property to deal with, and there have also been older threads addressing such big undertakings.

Here is a link that might be useful: no landscaping thread