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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You could take pictures and go to Merrifield Garden Center and they will talk with you. It could be a starting point.

You can also post pics online at the Gardenweb or similar, and people offer helpful suggestions.

Both are free! Good luck. [/quote]

Thank you! I’ll check out Gardenweb. To PPs calling me cheap, that’s fine and I can see why you landscape designers would be angry or defensive. But I’m just not ready to commit to a full overhaul just yet. We did do some work inside the house and perhaps that process was what made me more apprehensive about the outdoor stuff. I wish we had waited on some interior changes so we could see how the house worked for us first. And we paid $500 for a bathroom reno design we hated and didn’t end up using. Both are the kinds of mistakes I don’t want to make with the landscaping, so I want to take my time, see what plants come up in the next few months, and talk to lots of people and think everything over before committing to full design work with drawings, etc. I’m happy to pay professionals for their work, and I do, but I’m not ready to green light the landscaping yet. [/quote]

So, you want someone with some expertise to drive out to your house, spend an hour or two talking to you about what problems you have, what plants you have, what to think about in terms of what to keep, what to replace, what jobs might be a priority, what jobs can wait, where is safe to put beds and what types of plants will work best.

You expect someone who only gets paid on a per job basis to take time out of their schedule to come out and do this for you, for free and with no guarantee that you'll hire them to do any additional work and that you might take what they've told you and hire out to some low cost company to do the work that (s)he recommended.

Why do you think anyone should do this?  You are comparing this to other home improvement companies like a kitchen or bathroom refitter or a contractor who will do a consultation for a home renovation or addition.  The difference is that the majority of those customers often will price out 2 or 3 and will pick one of the 2 or 3 companies to do the work.  In a case like yours, you are trying to get educated for free and in this type of situation, most homeowners are not necessarily going to go back to the person who only did the consultation for the work.  Many of them will just do work as described on a smaller scale, doing some themselves, hiring out small individual jobs to some smaller company.

We did what you wanted, but we paid for a design.  It involved a landscape professional coming, and doing all that you wanted and giving us a drafted document of recommendations.  We paid for that.  After the design, other things came up and we have only done a few of the smaller tasks ourselves, but we didn't just use the designer for free.  We paid him for a design and we have the design.  If our priorities change again and we can do some of the bigger projects, we'll go back to this designer to have him help us with those larger jobs.[/quote]

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