Cottage Garden replacement for....this....

This juniper hedge hides our well house which sits in the middle of our front lawn. The path to the left of the pic is the walkway to our front door. The pyracantha on the right sits next to our living room window. So this is the first thing people see when they walk up to our house and it is the main view out of our living room window. This hedge is over six feet wide in spots. It is a mass of spider webs and all kinds of nastiness. Who knows what is actually living in there. I would love some advice about either taking it out, or at least taming the wild beast.

I would love to just rip it out, but I am not sure we have the manpower to do that right now... We need something to hide the well house, and keep the kiddos away from it. But I am not sure what. At the very least I will need to prune it back significantly, but if we are going to leave it, I don't want to kill it. LOL. It would be worse if it were just dead sticks and I still couldn't get it out of the ground! Can I prune it back severely and expect it to fill nicely with new green growth? Can I do that now?

Maybe I should post in the landscaping forum too, but I thought I would see if you guys had any cottage gardening tips for dealing with it. :)

I see in the back ground a nice split rail fence ,if you take out the bushes, maybe a similar fence with smaller bushes and some nice climbers. You could start with one side and move on from there.
Good luck I have removed some large bushes of that type ''not easy'' Be careful of the roots so they do not mess up your well. Maybe best to cut just below ground level and not pull roots.We had to use a truck to pull ours out and it left a large hole.

Thanks, yeah, this well house services two wells, the house well and the irrigation well. The pipes go right under the bushes..... how smart was that. I was thinking of a little mini fence around it, so that I could grow some vines on it.

I think my best bet will be to try to prune it back, until I can figure out what to replace it with. Do you know how far I can go on a juniper hedge?

Maybe take them all out put in an arbor to grow vines up, add tall plants in the center of the arbor and plants as needed to fill it all in.

Sorry, I am no help on the hedge trimming thing , but I am sure someone here at DG must know.
Along the idea from nanny some climbing fragrant roses would be beautiful near the entrance way.

You could always plant some kind of climbing/trailing rose if you decided to do the fence. If not, some nice tall hollyhocks, native grasses, with some native wildflowers mixed in and some daylilies in the front would be great. The only problem with that plan is that in the winter it would all die back. Hmmmm....

Another thing I am thinking about is that tall cottonwood. It is a great old tree but that puts this area in almost 100% shade. It is bright shade, but still.

Being in NM, that probably wouldn't do much damage to sun-loving plants. You could also plant something like Cowpen Daisy or sunflowers??

You could put a nice big statue right on top of that well head. Looks like there is a flat surface on top. Then, bring in HUGE glazed pots and plant all sorts of flowers and herbs in them and place them around the perimeter of the juniper. It would help hide the hose reels, which are more of a distraction that the well head to me. Then, the juniper becomes the green to balance all the flowers. I wouldn't trim the juniper, but leave it all natural and undulating. The pots could be moved (if you placed them on wheels) to access pipes/hoses/well. Then, you are not disturbing roots (I've ripped out junipers in the high desert of CA, not fun!).