You feel a little overwhelmed, naturally, because you are starting the design process backwards--not your fault--most people do the same thing. You have plants and are trying to make sense of them, to create an effective design and landscape with them.

Pretend you don't have any of those plants or beds. Draw your house, driveway, whatever can't change very roughly on a piece of paper. Don't worry about being an artist. Just big circles or squares will do fine. No graph paper or rulers.

Now play with possibilities, after looking at pictures in magazines and books and driving around and just out of your own head.

Rough out what you'd like your property to look like. Then see how you can fit in the plants you already have. Get rid of any that don't work. Give them away or have a yard sale.

The key is to start with the big picture and then down to the details. If you just can't do it, hire a landscape designer--someone who did a property in your town that you like.

I would advise against what the previous poster said: you need to cope NOW, and plan later. For now, unfortunately, it's weed and mulch (a 10-15 sheet layer of newspapers covered with grass clippings will do) bed by bed. Toss the weeds into a compost heap and let them contribut to next year's mulch.

Draw a sketch of the CURRENT layout, and in a larger view of each bed or area, identify what you have growing where. The best time to move plants is often when they are hard to identify. If there's a plant you absolutely hate, yank it out.

Prune any dead, damaged or wildly out of place branches on the shrubs and trees.

I have to agree with "lazygardens"...I am in the same boat as you are and am trying to figure it all out, right now I am busy pruning all the shrubs like the rhodies,spirea, and lilacs , butterfly bush, forsythia's...have a couple hydrangia's that have not come in to full bloom and a host of other plants, doing lots of weeding and mulching....you will eventially figure out what to keep and what to get rid of, just hang in there, I'm thinking it 's going to take at least two years to get everything the way I want it and maybe longer because I'm always changing my mind, I should definately have a plan but that would take away all the fun. Good luck...

I started out three years ago with over 200 feet of overgrown perennial border filled with weeds. The first year, I weeded as much as I could while I ID'd the plants I wasn't familiar with.

Once I figured out what I had, I started on my re-design, and started potting up plants that needed to be moved to make way for changes. The ones I wanted to re-use later were put in a holding area, others were given away. As sections of new borders were ready, plants from the holding area were planted, and new plants purchased and added.

Other sections were dismantled the same way as the new design was implemented. I'm not finished, but most of the old border is gone, what's left is weed free. It needs more re-organization, but I'm working on it.

New borders are filling in. As I refine my new planting scheme, plants I reused because I needed fillers are coming out to make way for more desirable plants. Others are being propagated because I want more of them.

It takes time. Mulch as much as you can to suppress weeds. Use pieces of cardboard and newspaper to under the mulch. Deadhead to prevent too much reseeding until you know which ones you want to reseed. Use a hoe in between plants if you can to chop weeds before mulching. Use Roundup carefully the same way to get control of large weedy areas. Enlist the help of family members to help weed. Use Preen to cut down on annual weeds sprouting until you get things under control.

I used my mower with the deck raised as high as it would go to clean up in fall, it was so bad. In spring, try to get all of the weeds out early and mulch everything.

a third vote for 'work with what you have, think/plan over the winter, start again in the spring'

wet cardboard is one of the best weed smotherers I've ever found. wet newspaper is a close second (three sheets, dampen with hose, repeat until 8-12 sheets deep, leavving plenty of overlap) and mulch over that will make things LOOK way less overwhelming.

I inherited a garden in a similar state- sickly roses, stands of tall phlox, a garden arbor of rebar and baling wire with a mildewy old grape vine on it that had taken over a fair bit of the yard...

this was going to be the year I really got things under control...and then my dad got really sick, and my cherry tomatoes have rambled all the way over the sugar cane and out the other side while I wasn't looking, and the 6" tall hibiscus I bought for a buck is a cubic yard of plant with flowers 10" across-

it's going to be a fall full of move this here, give these away, break this up for to propagate...and completely redo the plant list and garden plan, so I can doodle over the winter.