What to do with a garden like this?

A giant silky oak which is regretably dying, and needs chopping down. Underneath all this natural mulch are stones which we laid, but the persistant weeds have grown through, as evidenced here... ......and here. I want to bobcat all the ground back to some sort of levelness (hard to do when you live on an incline) and pave the whole darn lot. Adam thinks it would be a complete waste of money because there is no drainage to speak of. Turfing with grass is out of the question because the area receives next to no sunshine. And the stones haven't worked. What other options are we left with? Anyone have any ideas?