Hey C! How's it going now? I can tell you from personal experience (I used to landscape myself) it is a hard job - but it's also easy to get ripped off if someone doesn't know EXACTLY what they're doing!!!
This spring I just wasn't up to weeding my front beds (which are HUGE) so we hired a friend who recently started landscaping to do it for us and to trip the bushes. Well... sometimes if you want something done - you just need to DO IT YOURSELF!!! I'm SO IRRITATED! Like you said - my front (here only a few months later) doesn't look any different than BEFORE we paid all that money.
He wasn't experienced enough to understand the different shrubs and weeds, etc... and YES I've explained it to him now! Some of our shrubs are really fast growing and if they aren't pruned HARD (really cut back) you get what we have now... needing to be cut in the dern middle of summer when it's a gillion degrees outside!
Likewise, certain weeds have to be DUG up (wild violets for instance) not just pulled - or you can spray them with weed killer before you re-mulch. This guy didn't know that and just pulled stuff and there's just as many weeds - actually more - than there were before. It's what I get for letting him and my hubby (God love him) handle it. Neither of them understood what was what and the front of my house SHOWS IT!!!
Depending on what type of exposure to sun you get, there are some very low maintenance things you can do, but truly, NOTHING is NO MAINTENANCE...
Even if you do the pots by the pool - just remember that you will need to water them more frequently because their pots (obviously) - and each year you'll have to replant them because rarely will they rebloom. (I've had a few rebloom just depending on how hard my winter freeze was).
Hope that helped but if you've got any specific questions - post them here for us or ask me in an e-mail. I'd like to know what you end up doing...... Good Luck!!!
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