Why I love my new house

[Griselda]

Yeah, I suspected as much. What, if anything, should I replace them with? I was thinking small cedar bushes, or maybe I could scrounge up a couple of half wooden barrels and grow some herbs in them.

That's a really narrow walkway already, which seems silly because the porch is actually not as small as it looks with those bushes there. Are the junipers covering up part of the steps, or are the steps that narrow?

I think you want to go for something that's going to make the stairs look more open. The barrels sound good, especially if you can get them a bit further away from the stairs than the current placement. If you're desperate for evergreen shrubbery, I have found that nest spruce grows very slowly and is not very prickly.

If it were my house, I'd be awfully tempted to take out both bushes, then plant a vine on the driveway side, clematis or something. That will soften up that corner quite a bit. But, since you don't want the porch to be closed in, on the other side you might just want to plant something low, like some flowers or herbs right down in the bed. That should visually connect the porch area to that front bed by the house, making it look more open even with a vine on the other side.

It looks like things are sparsely planted enough that you have tons of possibilities.:)