I’d like to hire someone to do some basic landscape design but I don’t think it would be worth it...I’m not sure...because it would only be in my front yard.
On one side of my house is a stamped concrete sidewalk with a solid amount of open grass area where I’ve considered putting a 20x40 pool. On the other side, I made my own garden bed up against the house and planted a couple hydrangeas, and a bunch of smaller annuals in top soil that I put there, graded fairly steeply away from the house (**** my sump pumps) with mulch around all...Probably 14 flowers in all. On the back of my house is a fairly sexy stamped concrete patio.
This past summer I built some retaining walls in the back corners of my property so that they came right to the bottom of my fence, which had had a 16 inch gap. Not big walls obviously but I needed to pour topsoil to help level out all the soil there...then I bought 27 6.5 foot green giants because they’re tough as ****, grow in just about any soil (we have clay once you go about five inches down), grow fast at about 3’ a year and act as a good “privacy fence” which is what I wanted. I then measured exactly where I wanted to plant all 27 of them so that they’d all be equidistant and so that my two sump pump discharge lines came out directly in the middle of two on each side. I did hire someone to plant them because one tree in the pot was about 200 pounds and I didn’t know how the hell I’d get them to the back or plant them though in hindsight, a dolly to move them should’ve been obvious. Still I already was SOL for about 5K in arborvitaes (108 of them) that I first had to take out of the ground, so I didn’t want these green giants to get ****ed up at all and waste more money. The guys planted them. I had more topsoil put around the top few inches of potted soil that stuck out of the ground to create a tiny burm. Then, I had 11 yards of mulch delivered and put the mulch back there myself. That was in early to late June. They look great still and I expect them to start growing pretty well this year and explode in 2021. I may put a 8 inch wall of stone around all these trees but that would be somewhere around $2,000-3,000 more, plus I’d probably hire someone to put it in so it looked absolutely perfect too and that would be an additional 2-3K too I bet. Would look so sexy but I’m also afraid one of my kids would sprint across the yard, stumble and go face/head first right into he corner of this stone wall.
Something like this...
None of this helps you thriller of course because you don’t live in the NE.