My husband and I live in a home on a mountain in northwest Arkansas and the people who built this home did not do landscaping besides a small garden bed on one side of the walkway to the stairs. My husband and I added the driveway, and now we would like to move on to landscaping.

Our Goal: Shorten the vertical distance between the ground and our front porch. The bottom of our house that’s covered in brick is actually a tall crawl space, so our home is one story. The wood posts holding up our porch are ugly and one of them is bent, and I really want to make them less prominent. We would like to plant a tree or two and an array of shrubs to fill in this space. I love flowers so that’s another thing I want to do but I’m especially concerned about doing the shrubs and tree in a visually appealing way. The horizontal space from the right of the stairs to the driveway is 22 feet across.

Limitations: Since we are on the side of the mountain, our yard is on a slope. Our front yard faces south. We live in zone 6b/7a. We have a lot of deer so all plants and shrubs must be deer resistant (such as Holly, barberry, juniper, arrow wood viburnum, butterfly bush, boxwoods, lambs ear, etc. [Not hostas, arborvitae, or azaleas]). I also don’t want to completely cover up the brick crawl space because doing so would make our garage and house look like two separate buildings.

Any suggestions for improving our space are greatly appreciated!