Egg80, if you plan to stay only 2 years you should decide right now if you
want to do a fast makeover so the garden looks fabulous when it goes on the
market, or do you want to keep it simple?

Given the house is cream with "redwood" trim, I would leave the shed and
fence paint alone. Their current color is keyed to the house trim and it
looks pretty good to me.

I would focus attention on the hedge, and on filling out the rather empty
looking beds under the fence. As you are beginners and not planning to
stay long, consider filling the fence beds with some pretty annuals from
a garden shop. See what you like.

The hedge looks like it needs fertilizer, more water, a little pruning,
and some organic mulch.

It looks like the neighbor has a low wall on the other side of the hedge,
but there are some holes in the wall, with flagstones (or broken cement)
covering the holes from your side. Did the neighbor put them there, or
the previous occupant of your house? Discuss with the neighbor repairing
the holes in the wall or covering them from the neighbor's side, maybe
with rectangles of plywood slipped between the wall and the neighbor's
side of the hedge, while you encourage the hedge to grow into the gaps.

It looks like someone on your side of the hedge cut it back to the stems
last year. This year, many new twigs will grow from the stems. I would
rake all the stones and trash from the soil between the hedge and grass,
then work compost and/or chemical fertilizer into the soil, then apply
grass seed. You may want to match the seed to your turf. Watering the
grass seed will also water the hedge.


Egg80 wrote:
Unfortunately, the shed will have to stay put.

That's too bad. The approach to the shed door is both constrained by
the step in the lawn, and blocked by the clothesline. I would find
that highly annoying. Can you put a new door on the backside and
"forget" the front door?


You aren't ready to start making major changes to the garden, until
deciding on some key questions like your preferred style and detailed
use. In a long narrow property one normal strategy so to split the
space into two parts, a front garden and a back garden, with a visual
barrier between the two. However, you have that huge tree at the
midpoint. From the new photos I guess it is a yew ... that has been
sheared? Anyway, it will cause the middle of the garden to be more
shaded than the rest in summer.

One way to see how flowers and shade edges work together, you can get
a few survey flags (bits of plastic on long stiff wires) at a hardware
store and stick them here and there and move them around.

Una