I'd like to see a photo that shows the area in front of the fence. Mexican Sage gets much larger than Lavender and it is not attractive to alternate plants. Better to group them.

I don't see that you have room for the PofM.

Bulbs sound fine but many of them will not return in your zone.

What are your overall goals for the landscape?

You need to return to where you took the picture and from that exact spot, swing the camera left and take a picture that slightly overlaps with the first one. Then swing it right and take another slightly overlapping picture, so that the complete picture, including the setting (context) can be seen.

"What flowers or plants would [we] recommend?" is the wrong question to be asking. Instead, you should be asking how planting and landscape work can solve problems and enhance the house and yard. Adding plants and flowers isn't necessarily going to improve your property when you have monster bushes blocking very important features of the home! It's just as likely you'd want to begin by removing things that have a negative effect on the view of your house before adding new plants. Wouldn't you want to consider the big picture first?

I think many times new members post here thinking plant selection is really landscape design.......it is not :-) Then the choice is whether to pursue actual design issues here, starting with the thoughts Yard has presented, or to just get a list of plants that would work, without particular concern for design issues.

If the second option is all that is desired, then post this question in the California Gardening forum for regionally appropriate choices. Living in SoCal, you should be focusing on waterwise plantings and natives.........sorry, no hydrangeas! And you might want to rethink that expanse of lawn!!

This is one of the Houzz cross posts. It is showing in three different areas. Landscape Design, California Gardening, and Garden. She has one other post that is in the correct Name That Plant.

I agree, I would repost in California Gardening and make sure it showed up there.

I disagree that plant choice is entirely different than landscaping. Right plant/right place is one of the foundations of landscaping. As many have mentioned, in S. Cal my issues would be water wise and fire wise first. Right now your house is engulfed in shrubs, which doesn't look like it is either esthetic or prudent. I would hesitate to remove a large tree though, lots of time and energy went into growing it, and it can provide shade. So that would be first on my list of "jobs" for my landscaping to do--enhance the entrance to my home, provide some relief from the heat, and give me something nice to look at when I come home. But again, that is me. Having said that, if you love hydrangeas and ranunculus, nothing wrong with providing them an irrigated spot in your yard, but in the front with afternoon sun is not going to be it for the hydrangeas. Surely there is another spot, and you can grow some hydrangeas in pots too, to give you even more options for placement. I think the same could be said for ranunculus although I have no direct experience with them. I did see them mentioned as being part of a "love garden" design that had a gazebo and reflecting pool surrounded by pots of showy and fragrant flowers in pots. It was for an arid location, sort of a take on a kama sutra type painting. Ranunculus was one of the flowers. It was in the book "Theme Gardens" by Barbara Damrosch, and it is quite old now and out of print but is a real hoot of a book and worth searching out.

Plant selection is indeed part of landscaping but it is really quite incidental to the concept of landscape design. And it is important to understand that they are two quite separate things. In fact, most Landscape Architecture curricula do not include plant identificaton or basic horticultural knowledge as part of the course of study at all.

"Right plant, right place" is not a design concept but a horticultural one :-) Landscape design principles will call out the size or form and/or placement of a plant but the plant selection itself is typically not undertaken until the design plan has been firmly established. It is the finishing touch of a landscape design, not the be-all and end-all. The design determines the plant selection, not the other way around. That's why Yard's mock-ups never include a specific plant choice but rather just a form or size.and suggested placement. There are very likely a dozen or more plants that would work in any single given planting situation in a landscape design.