Mrs Green Thumb?

This weekend I went out to survey our landscaping or lack there of, take dead stuff off the plants and remove the dead plants.

When we bought our house almost 4yrs ago the city had a program that if you sent in a pic of the front of your home and a plan of what you would do if the city gave you $$ to make your yard "beautiful" they would either approve or deny the grant money to you. The list of eligible items was quite large ranging from flowers to weed killer (I just finished using the last bottle of weed killer this weekend). Well we apparently made our plan money worthy and for some reason they approved us (2yrs in a row) to have some $$ we purchased 8 plants, grass seed and weed killer. Once you are approved and make your purchases and "improvements" you send a after picture in. Well I hope they don't ask for a 4yrs later picture (I cannot find any of the pics as of right now) as only 2 of the 8 plants are still alive (I got a little over excited with the weed killer well just leave it at that) what does grace our flower beds are from my parents house (we did some splitting and transplanting of some hostas) and some peonies (which did not come from my parents but was rather an undercover transplanting job involving dark time a hooded sweatshirt, bucket and one of those little shovel things.)

I do want our landscaping to look nice hello curb appeal is necessary to sell a house (no, we are no where near ready to sell the house I can only wish) it's just going to require a lot of motivation, work, time and money. And the day those 4 things all line up will be a miracle. Until then we will work with what we have I mean the hostas have been there for about 3yrs and I've yet to kill them so that's a good sign I feel. I may be calling on a friend who works for a local event planning company as a florist and has and eye for this kind of stuff. It's simple, I need easy to care plants(meaning they require nothing of me).

There are certain things Marcus simply won't let me do, do to previous experiences gone wrong.
Example: there was a tree behind our house and it needed to be trimmed Marcus felt this was a task I could handle and so I was super excited to be handed a rather large pair of scissors things and trimmed the tree in only the areas I could reach meaning I left it looking very top heavy and uneven. So I forgot to step back and take a look at my work as I trimmed minor detail. Well, not so minor when Marcus then had to dig the tree up and toss it do to it's awful appearance.
Example #2 we had a row of about 4 lilac bushes and b/c of a tree in our yard they were not growing evenly and after the tree was removed by the power line trimming guys (they did such a horrible job of trimming the tree around the lines that they had to remove it at their expense before it fell on our garage) I felt it was time to give the lilac bushes a trim well fast forward to today we only have 1 small lilac bush remaining (it's still recovering from the trim that I did).

Who wants to hire me to trim some bushes?? This could be why I was always my dad's assistant (I picked up the trimmings) when it came to trimming the bushes or the fact that he used a chain saw thingy and there are very few power tools that I get along when turned on. Ask me to bring you a power tool no problem ask me to use it and that's where things get a little iffy.