I've live in my new construction home for about 9 months now and it's time to give it some life, especially with summer right around the corner. When we purchased our 1/2 acre lot, we didn't realize that a large section of our backyard- about 50 plus feet went down a pretty steep slope, deeming it useless. To try and take back some of the yard in conjunction with our pool build, we built a fairly long retaining wall, about 100 feet wide. This was all done at the same time the house was being constructed, I still have about 27 feet in front of the retaining wall to play with in the future ( I envision a step down deck with an additional retaining wall in front so that I can remove the obstruction of the black gate and bring it down a bit lower out of eyesight from the back porch- probably with a fire pit and hard garden)

I want to make our backyard a tropical oasis and feel like we are on vacation all year round, without taking up too much of our "yard" as we would like to start a family and want to have a yard for kids to play in. Im looking for landscape advice as well as color pallets to go with the existing rust colored fabric of some outdoor patio seating set we just purchased as well - I'm not in love with the color, but I think bringing in some turquoise, yellow and maybe a muted green can punch it up. Any suggestions or thoughts would be much appreciated!

A few notes, our retention wall is about 5 feet 10 inches tall, and the paver area behind the pool is about 10 feet, each grassy area flanking the pool is about 27 feet X 25 feet. Once I fence in the rest of the yard, I will get rid of the baby gate, but it's here to stay until that time.