After posting my message above, I went over to The New York Times and this article was in the Home & Garden section.
http://www.garden.org/regional/report/author/8
My husband and I are constantly working on landscaping around our house, and it's been a huge project. We've done it ourselves, and it's not there by a long shot, but bit by bit and section by section we're coming up with a sort of cohesive look. But there's still more, way more, we want to do, and we never really know how to approach it. We usually do it by talking for months about potential plans, hashing through possibilities, and a lot of standing around in the yard and driveway and walking around and considering.
I'm considering giving Maggie Oster a call myself, for maybe a little bit of consulting, but we're always reluctant to pay anybody for a thing we figure we should be able to figure out ourselves.
When we first moved into our house, it was just a house plunked down in the middle of ten acres. No landscaping of any kind, only two tiny pear trees, and a driveway. Not even a sidewalk to the front stairs. We started by putting a sidewalk in. We stood around the front of the house for weeks, dragging a long hose around to set off potential parameters, and then started digging and putting in stone.
Our sidewalk/construction mess, finished about 2 years ago:
ugly garage door:
new doors into garage/now bakery:
pergola/patio work, outside bakery:
finished pergola/patio, completed a couple of weeks ago:
pic of the front yard about 3 or 4 weeks ago (one of the horse pastures is in front of the front yard, and this is taken standing at the fence):
This weekend we're working on the landscaping around the patio/pergola, putting in gardens and stone walls.
We haven't even gotten around to the back of the house yet.
I'm thinking we'll never be done. If I could only convince my husband to win the lottery, we could pay somebody for this stuff.