Bones in the Garden - A Tale of Garden Planning, Part 1

This is why winter is a great time to plan a new garden. It's also the perfect time to look around the neighborhood and see what looks interesting, even in winter under snow. Some things I can learn from my own yard, others from neighboring places, and a few by visiting the local nursery which prides itself on having an interesting garden in winter as well as spring, summer and fall.

It's also a good time to notice the things in your existing garden that have gone dormant and left big blank spots. While these plants have definite uses, you don't want to rely too heavily on them if this is a garden the world will see daily as it drives by.

In this particular garden we already have one good feature. The yard is bounded on three sides by stone walls. To the left of the house as you face it the wall is quite high and full of planting pockets for rock garden plants and succulents. The walls closest to the street are lower, but still attractive. The fourth wall, unfortunately, is plain concrete. That one will have to be hidden with a permanent planting. The front of the house also has a fairly boring concrete foundation that screams for something permanent to hide it. I make a note: Look into evergreen shrubs and plants.

Another pre-existing "bone" is the front walk, which forms a somewhat sharp diagonal leading from the street to the front porch. The fact that is is laid at a slant means that the garden-to-be is divided into two unequal portions, one appreciably larger than the other, The larger part, the side I will concentrate on in this article, is quite deep, which would make it impossible to access much of the garden if it were planted as one large bed. So the need for a second path dividing this into manageable sections becomes immediately apparent. I decide on fieldstone, because it practically grows in our yards and will be both inexpensive and a perfect match for the rock wall it is leading us toward.

The front yard is already slightly shaded by a neighbor's large tree. The one existing piece of plant material I must work into this scheme is yet another tree which will eventually make one half of the yard even shadier. Audrey's son, a landscape architect, insists that the front left corner of

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