Beginner Gardening: Massachusetts starting from scratch, 1 by aerlinnel

aerlinnel wrote:
This is a house that some friends and I are renting half of (our landlady lives in the other half, and has given me the green light to do pretty much whatever with the garden/yard). I've looked at pages and pages of advice and plants, but I'm completely new to landscaping, so I haven't really got an eye for what will look good or not.

I'll have to take better pictures of the empty mulch beds in front of the house, and behind the fence is the "lawn" (currently a patch of waist-high weeds, but I'll start working on that first, this fall). The first design piece I want to tackle is that strip next to the driveway. At first, I thought of some sort of evergreen hedge, but I think that might look awkward directly in front of the house, especially running perpendicular to the building. Should I go for ground cover, or would groupings of flowers look better there?

Also -- you may be able to tell this from the photo -- there's a sort of nook to the left of the stairs. I would dearly love to incorporate a star magnolia into the design, but thought it might run a little too wild for that small space there. Would a tallish, narrow evergreen be better?

Thanks for reading!