For useful plant suggestions more info on location needed - the zone info is too vague. Nearest large city please. You want an ”elaborate” garden? That could = high maintenance or it could be an English style garden with lots of flowers. Please also add more pics taken from farther away to show the entirety of the house & the tree I see in edges of pics. Also any walkways that exist or areas where one is wanted. Your home is so pretty. The ideas that popped into my head from your pictures are that I wouldn’t plant in front of the stone covered foundation. They are a nice feature & it would be too bad to cover them up. A small evergreen at corner of the house / foundation would be good though. As for porches - I’d want very deep & curved planting beds in front of them & filled with evergreens as backbone of beds & with spring & summer flowering smaller shrubs that work for your climate. Maybe a tree too but need to see more of lot & house from a distance.

Sure! Perhaps elaborate is the wrong word. Cottage garden maybe. We are in rural Michigan near Lansing. The yard has trees taken down (a tall tree fell on our house right after we bought it, so we had the other 2 that were the same age and kind taken down too). The right side of the picture is west, and gets a ton of wind, so the front porch faces north. There’s a slope to the far right behind one of the stumps, which is a septic mound. There’s no paths or walkways to the front (we use the side door off the side porch).

It looks like you have a large lot, so I'd start with a wind break.

Best Evergreens for Windbreaks - Midwest Gardening

Then, I'd do a path from your door. If you don't expect to ever need a path straight from the door to the road, make a generous path from the door to the driveway. By generous, I mean wide and a nice curve away from the house, to provide a generous garden between it and the path.

Next, I'd pick a beautiful, flowering tree for your front yard. You can place it to either block views you want to block or not block views you want to keep.

Then, I'd go for some foundation shrubs.

"Elaborate garden" usually implies an avid gardener with lots of opinions about plants and gardens, Is that you? If not, did you mean a very formal garden?

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Thanks for the extra pics! Such a great house. A tree - you do want a tree, yes? That would be the first thing I’d choose the spot for & then search for the tree that’s perfect for that spot. Spring flowers would be lovely. Site it so you’ll see it from the window(s) you look out of most of the time - kitchen? How about veggie gardens? Raised beds or not? All I know about MI is lots of snow in winter & hot in summers. So, I cannot offer specific plants but a local nursery should be your new best friend. You do want to design a layout before spending too much $$ on plants. Since you do have lots of snow I’m not sure how important evergreens are to your scape since they’d be buried in winter. For a cottage garden look you do want lots of flowers. Flowering shrubs should be the backbone of that & you’d want a range that flower early spring & early to mid summer & that bloom all summer. You might have a spot for roses. No planting over the septic but I’m sure you know that!

Our style for the front and sides is kind of ”English cottage garden.” A little wild. Definitely not super formal. Maybe a bit like this:

But yes, in the back we will need to sort that out too. We do want vegetables, herbs, sand play area for the kids, etc. But that’s a lot to plan as well.

We aren’t exactly total novices, but yeah, we are actually total novices. We grew and canned vegetables in raised beds in Texas. But no real experience with flowers at all..and no experience in Michigan at all. But of course, we had no experience rebuilding a dilapidated house! Lol. So we can learn!

Make sure you have enough winter structure. It's easy to be taken in by the pretty flowers, and create a garden that looks like nothing on earth all winter. When winter is half the year, it has to be taken into account in the design stage.

If you can find it at a local library, you might want to read Thalassa Cruso's book Making Things Grow Outdoors. It's the adventures of an avid, but inexperienced, English gardener who is transplanted to the wilds of suburban Boston. At this point, it's about 50 years old, but tries to explain the 'whys' of things that work and don't work. Things like formal gardens being *less* work than informal ones so long as the gardener doesn't need perfection.

You have one of the state's best sources of info in MSU. And the Lewis Landscape Arboretum. Clarence E. Lewis Landscape Arboretum - Department of Horticulture Plenty of examples and info right on your doorstep.

You need groupings of small trees in appropriate places and distance near the house to soften its placement on the land. I'd also plant large trees at some distance to eventually create a grove look.

For shade from the hottest sun of the day, trees should go to the W/SW.

You seem to have no gutters on the house. It's not landscaping, but yeah, it kind of can be. You should get gutters on the house. And plan for run off areas. Or if you are into it, rain collection.

Plan your windbreak to the west. That's where your winds tend to come most from. North is your next break, that's your winter winds. South can be done too if you feel the need, but those are usually more during the summer. If you have room, staggering evergreens is a good option. Other stuff can get planted in too, but evergreens will be your best bet. What kinds depends on your lot and how much room you got to plant. Evergreens come in all sorts of sizes.

Something else to think about sooner than later is your winter plans for access. As in, you need a plan for your walking and driving and where snow removal goes. Some of your landscaping plans have to factor that in. A row of bushes or other landscaping can make for a good snow fence around an area. And also be a PITA in the winter if they are in the wrong place for where the snow gets removed to.

All this isn't directly plants and landscaping. But it is big things that impact it. Or can be things you need to work around, just like your septic mound has to be worked around.

Outside that... Lansing is a great area. All kinds of gardening. And now is a good time to start looking around. There are a few good nature centers in the Lansing area. You can find out a lot about natives from those places. Good handful of nurseries too.

Thanks for your ideas! We are trying to plan. Does anyone know of a good designer who works remotely?

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Given the amount of gory, location specific, details a good designer is going to need, I can't imagine one working remotely. And TBH, I wouldn't want one. I've seen too many problems locally where people brought up very good designers from the City (NYC, which is only 2 or 3 zones warmer than we are) and had the design fall apart because key plants weren't hardy here.

Remotely? As in you aren't on the property yet and need someone to be able to be remote to you? Because there are landscaping services around Lansing. You can probably get someone that is close to your property and can go to it and willing to work remote to you.

If you mean you want someone to work remotely instead of coming you your property... you can ask that too. But you might have more difficulty in getting someone to work with.

I guess I just had noticed other people on Houzz using remote designers (garden designers over the internet) as well as architects whose style they admire, which might be easier to find online because the style and mentality you’re looking for are more rare. I guess I assumed that locally it would be more ”all in one” where you pay someone a ton of money to both design and put in the whole thing, and that they would tend to be heavy on the pergolas and hardscape and pavers, and light on the actual creative plant side of the garden. But I guess I haven’t looked.

Yes, Emily, ditto everything that @Kendrah explained. You have a giant project ahead of you & working on it in stages makes most sense. Here’s my experience with design & install - I have a 1/3 acre urban lot, unlike your huge country property but the process is the same.

We have used landscape designers twice in my current home, First was when we moved in to our new build home. Clean slate zero plants in back yard, builder installed turf grass, a few rocks & shrubs in front yard. We hired a local landscape installer who put us in touch with a great landscape design person. The installers needed a design to work from. We were having hardscape, a water feature & irrigation installed in addition to planning the plantings. I wanted to choose my own plants & DIY the install of the plants because I enjoy that. We did that after the hardscape & irrigation was installed & we took our time doing it. We also made some changes to the plant selection along the way because I know enough about which plants would work with the design to be able to do that. The DIY on plant install saved us $$ too. For me, shopping in nurseries for plants is my idea of a little bit of heaven.

Fast forward 12 years in this home. We wanted to remove all of our turf grass from front yard & convert it to a pretty & plant filled landscape. Because it was our front yard, public facing, it was important to us to have a landscape that enhanced our home & that was well planned with pathways & good backbone of small evergreen conifers. I hired a local designer who I found here on Houzz. We paid her for the design only & hired the local landscape installers who had done our back yard since we knew & liked them. For the design process, the designer visited our home & walked both front & back yards to see everything we had, Next 2 people came to photograph & measure the entire front yard. Both still photos & video. All utilites, gates, hardscape, house, borders etc. were measured & noted. Next, designer sent a first layout via email which we had printed to a 2’x3’ size. It had all plants & pathways laid out & labeled & included a separate plant list. Per our contract we were allowed several changes but it was the layout that was most important. There was a separate plan for the hardscape with exact measurements for pathway. That’s what landscape installers would use to install path in proper place & the plant design is what they used to locate the drip irrigation hoses & heads. Our existing inground sprinkler system was converted to the drip irrigation system. The cost of the designer was @ $2,500. That’s usual for my area. The cost of the landscape installer was much more of course but we didn’t want to DIY the removal of turf & change of irrigation system or the new soil needed to create berms etc on a formerly flat yard. We also wanted them to install the plants for us. I did visit a large nursery with my plant list & that nursery sourced all the plants for us. I paid them separately from landscape installer. I wanted to control the plant selection. But, the landscape installer picked up & delivered the plants to my home when they were ready for them.

My point in relating this long story to you is to let you know that you can get the kind of advice you need / want & you can control the cost with DIY or not. Years ago in our first new build home in CA, we also had a design drawn up but we did 100% DIY on the install. We were much younger then, so stronger, more energy & much less $$ in our pockets then! My advice - find that designer! First step! Call MSU extension as @dan1888 advises. Great advice!

Thank you, that’s very helpful! I’m afraid 2.5k isn’t really in the budget! But it is still worth looking. Thanks

Emily - I mentioned the price I paid so that you’d have a frame of reference. But, I did say ’for my area’. I have an idea that these kinds of things cost more in my higher cost of living area than where you are. You’re right that it is still worth looking. Also keep in mind that a designer may have a scale of charges that are dependent on the amount of detail & time they put into the design. So, you could negotiate a great price that you’re willing to pay. It will be $$ well spent as it’s just as much an investment into your new home as all the $$ you’ve spent on interior renovation!

ETA - if there’s a landscape design school in your area, reach out to them. The students need class projects to apply their newly learned skills! It might be a great possibility. The MSU extention might be able to answer that question too.

Ust their form and add lots of pictures and measurements. MSU is always helpful.

The wonderful thing about being in the country is that there are no neighborhood standards to maintain. You're free to experiment. One easy option is simply to stop mowing an area where you would like non-lawn and see what grows. There's a seed bank in the soil from years/decades/centuries past; it might offer good things for free. (You'll want to identify what grows so you can remove undesirables.) You can also easily play with bed shapes and sizes with your mowing patterns. If you don't like your first attempt, mow it down and try a differently-shaped area. Once you have something you like, you can gradually convert it to gardens if you like. (As a bonus, grass that is not mowed into turf becomes easier to remove. And tall grasses wave in the breeze, form interesting seedheads, and turn gold/tan later in the season, all of which make unmown grass nice in itself.)

I played with various edits of your photo, but really, I liked a very simple, natural look the best. Manicured suburbia just doesn't belong here. The photo below plants another shade tree near the stump, surrounds it with a few native shrubs, and lets wildflowers grow in the grass, nothing more. (Well, maybe an old-fashioned lilac by the side porch?)

Check out the local garden places in your new area. I wanted to remove everything the seller had in our front gardens, so I got a free design from a highly rated garden center because I bought the foundation plants from them. I had a professional gardener rip the previous plants/shrubs out and we installed an underground water system. THAT IS A LIFE SAVER. It’s worth the money to know you can just use timers all summer and your garden gets watered.

Take your time. You do need a path from the cars to the front door. Your gardens can be as large or small as you want, but learning what will grow easily may take some research. You bought a lovely, lovely house! Adding the “jewelry” of a beautiful garden will enhance your home.

@simplynatural Has the best suggestion yet. It sounds like you are on a budget and have tons of land. Gardens can get expensive fast and even a medium sized garden is going to look small on your big piece of land. I'd plant a no mow garden in your yard, and mow a path through it to the door, and edges around it create the layout.

Surly consult MSU about this. It takes more effort to plan one of these than it looks, and takes time to establish and manage too. But it will be budget wise and in the long run not require much care.

Then over time you can consult about and add tress and shrubs to your property. Love how the last one is created in relationship to a vegetable garden.