We were going to get one underground but worried DH couldn't get in and out of it.
They are lots of them if you google storm shelters. Some have really landscaped them nice. Good luck!
We bought one from
http://twistersafe.com they are out of Neosho, Mo.
it is small and is called a work bench it's in our garage. There is just the 2 of us and the dog.Just had it done in Sept. Hope we never have to use it!!

I bought the slope front shelter, made by Hausner in Drumright and sold statewide.

Me, I want the dirt around the outside, just more protection. Mine was installed in August and I'm still filling in from settling.

But I'll be happy with dirt once I get it covered with bermuda.

You can landscape it pretty much anyway you want. Once your plants are well-established, erosion will be minimal because the plant roots will hold the soil in place, particularly if you have mulch on top of the soil. Most of the people here in our county that have landscaped have gone with a rock garden type theme.

We have the same kind of shelter that LCDollar mentioned, and we've had ours since about 2002. For years I mostly had annual flowers there, but the bermuda grass from the yard constantly invaded the flower beds, so finally I planted orange-flowered trumpet creeper vines in the soil. The vines formed a huge mound, looking more shrubby than viney, and are in bloom for months in the summertime/autumn. I do have to cut back the plants regularly to keep the door free and clear for quick access, but except for the doorway there in the middle of the big mass of greenery with orange flowers, you can't even tell we have a tornado shelter. It just looks like a big green blooming shrub.

A lot of the people around us who have gone the rock garden route often have more rocks than plants, but you can blame that on the last 3 droughty summers that have been hard on their plants.

If you have bermuda grass near the tornado shelter, it definitely will try to invade and cover the soil that covers the shelter. If I was going to plant flowers on the sloping soil around the shelter and I had bermuda grass around the shelter, I'd use a woven landscape fabric covered with mulch to help exclude the bermuda grass. Otherwise, you'll constantly battle the grass. With the landscape fabric, the grass still will attempt to take over the area, but as long as you remove the bermuda as soon as you see it, it won't have time to grow through the landscape fabric and make a real mess of things.

In the earliest years of our tornado shelter's existence, I just sowed handfuls of zinnia, poppy, larkspur and pink evening primrose (highly invasive, but gorgeous) seeds on the bare soil and had flowers almost year round--larkspur from latest winter/earliest spring, followed a month or two later by the emergence of the poppies, followed by the pink evening primroses and the zinnias. However, in late fall through early spring, I didn't really have anything growing and blooming there, so I'd just throw mulch over the area to prevent erosion.

If your soil is really sandy, you likely will have a bigger erosion problem than I have with dense clay.

Dawn

Thanks for all the ideas! My husband really likes the workbench in the garage but that would be too small for our family.
Our soil is dense red clay, maybe it would not take that long for the dirt at the shelter side to settle. I would rather not try to fight Bermuda grass again, my ego is still bruised from the battle I lost against Bermuda this summer when I tried to keep it out of a flower bed by using some organic, biodegradable landscape fabric... I like the idea of havin a climbing shrub over the shelter, this sounds great! Or just have the grass climb on it.