It looks very nice! It's great that you had such good help :)

Very neat, Woody.

Last picture: I bet those two characters with their backs (rather bums) to us weren't much help.

Two thumbs up. Love the shed color especially.

You have a very nice woodland setting, I love all the trilliums, I need to add a bunch this year, as I only have 'Snow Bunting', but it's a real beauty!

Terrance

Looks great!

Looks great! This year I lost the help of my grandson. He bought his own house and is busy transforming his own yard. Will be a while for the great grandsons to get big enough. Al

SB - The two 'characters' (and their predecessors and buddies) are a key factor in the layout of the paths. (Only the poodle is ours; the Airedale is BIL's and is one of the dogs we regularly dog-sit for relatives, friends, and neighbours.) Dogs will patrol their territory - .i.e. will run the fence-lines - so if there isn't a path there, they will make one! Rather than fight the inevitable, we put paths along the routes that the dogs use - and the paths make access to the beds from all sides easier for viewing and maintenance of the garden.... There are 7 dogs on the properties on the other sides of the fences so the dogs on our side really, really want to get close to the fences! The dogs prefer the 'path of least resistance' so rarely run through the garden beds, staying on the paths instead. A neighbour and his 1-year-old Collie joined us for morning wakies today and then the three dogs gave the new path surface a workout during a vigorous game of chase :-) Riley had not been in the backyard before but he automatically stayed on the paths when they were running about. The paths give them a choice of an inner and outer circuit, with connecting paths along the way so they can easily change the route. So this garden is for both people and dogs!

BlueBirdPeony - The shed started out as blue-gray with white trim. But that made the shed the focal point rather than the garden. So a few years ago it finally occurred to me to paint the shed in greens to blend into the background more. We're quite happy with the result although I may darken the lighter colors a bit in a few years time when it might need repainting.

twrosz - Trilliums do well around here and the white T. grandiflorum are the provincial flower of Ontario. There is a nearby woodlot that is completely carpeted with them in spring - a spectacular sight! I hope that, someday, parts of this garden will be carpeted with them too. They have been spreading well from offsets and seeding around a lot - but it'll be a few more years before the seedlings start to bloom. All mine are singles. Most of them are the white ones but I have one patch of the red ones too.

The straight paths probably don't appeal to a lot of you. Once the plants are up and growing (they are VERY late this year!), the look becomes much softer and 'natural' with the underlying more 'formal' structure receding to providing the calm framework for the plants to spill over exuberantly :-)

calistoga - I bet your grandson learned a lot from helping you! My garden here is heavily influenced by my maternal grandparents' place where I grew up and learned to garden from my grandfather. Long live grandfathers! (mine lived to 94 - gardening is good for you!)

really ...???

this goes a little beyond 'chore' .... lol ...

a lot more stable than walking on mulch also ...

supreme ...

my goal.. any given season.. is to change the 'view' ... in one perspective of my garden ... something 'new' ... and boy did you do that ..

congrats.. superlative ... i am almost at a loss for words.. some hundreds words later.. of course... lol

two thumbs.. and one big toe ... up ...

ken

ps: i fall over if i do two toes up ...

AARGH!! I just lost the reply I was writing.... Ken - LOL re your comments. The backyard garden layout has basically remained the same since 2008, although plantings and other details have changed a bit. So the work detailed in this thread really was in the 'chore' category of improving and refreshing something that was already there. We've been gardening here since spring 2000. The backyard garden was developed piecemeal, starting at the back fence and moving towards the house, over about 6 years. My winter 2007/2008 project was figuring out how to make the space more organized - the current layout was the result. Most people find it a bit unexpected when they first see it - it's quite different from the more traditional flowery front garden, and not at all in step with current fashion for wavy 'natural' bed edges! Most people seem to like it though (or are too polite to tell us otherwise....!)

It's a bit depressing this year that things are so late to start growing. This picture of the shed area is from mid May last year:
{{gwi:35204}}

So, Ken, what is the 'new' that you are planning in your garden this year?

dont forget.. the later the stuff is.. the lesser the chance of no frost or freeze damage ... i have only had one light frost episode .. since the plants emerged.. 45 minutes ago ... lol ...

i dont know about this years plan... right now.. i am laying down hundreds of gallons of RUp .. trying to get the beds in good shape ...

heck.. just removing all winter damaged conifers.. will make the 5 acres look like a redo ... you will probably see the burn pile smoke up in canada ..

ken

how many ton of rock was that??? [maybe i missed it above.. work with me...]

ken

Ken - since I'm only working with 1/4 acre here, getting the garden in shape pales in comparison with what you must be doing! I'd love to have a large property but, realistically, I know we've got as much as we can manage at this point in our lives.

It sounds like you lost a lot of things - that must be sad when you have lots of special things in the garden, as I know you do from your posts on various forums. I've been surprised at what survived and what didn't. For example, I lost a 'Verdoni' Hinoki false cypress that I planted last summer, but the 'Golden Dream' boxwood I planted a short distance away at the same time came through just fine. The Verdoni is rated for zone 5 (4 in some sources) while Golden Dream is rated zone 6. Some Japanese maples took a beating but others are fine, including one that barely survived a move a year or two ago but now seems to be thriving!.

We only used about two cubic yards of the crusher run gravel. This is the third time for renewing the path material since I planned to do it every 5 years or so. In the past I used a mix of concrete sand and the pine bark mulch, so there was a good base of sand packed into our heavy clay soil already. The gravel topping isn't too deep and we didn't do all the paths - just the parts most affected by run-off or standing water episodes. The intent was just to firm things up a bit more using somewhat heavier material that packs down well for firmer footing and, hopefully, a bit better resistance to moving when there is surface water run-off. (I'm not dealing with high volume flooding.) It has noticeably improved the firmness of the paths so far - we'll see how it holds up in a year or two.... If necessary, we can add more later but most of the paths were in half-decent shape so I'm hoping this with do for now - a 'good enough' solution rather than a technically ideal one! :-) For me, the test of adequacy of the job is whether I can walk the paths and feel relatively safe doing so. So far, this is a nice improvement and I don't feel that it is worth the time, effort, money, or disruption to the plantings to do a big excavation job to put down a deeper base.

Woody, that looks stellar! I really like the straight lines you have going back there. It's a nice mix with your more free-flowing beds out front. And since it was a necessity for the dogs, even better! It looks like a great garden design, and not designed around the needs of your canine buddies!

Ken, I'm really sorry you lost so many evergreens this winter. You have a great attitude about it. This spring I've pretty much sworn off evergreens (unfortunately) due to winter losses each year and trying to keep up with the deer damage. I tried to have them for winter interest, but if the deer devour them, they're the only ones interested! LOL!

I thought some of you might like to see what all those straight lines look like today - I took a bunch of pictures this morning while walking around yanking tree seedlings!

From the porch, looking up the straight path that heads under the pines:
{{gwi:229516}}
You can't tell, from this angle, that there's a path along the fence on the right. But that path is now much, much easier to walk on since we put down the crushed gravel base and widened the path a bit.

The path down the south fence:
{{gwi:229518}}

And the center path just to the right of it - ends at 'the wet corner' bed:
{{gwi:229520}}

The shed area from a different angle than the one showing the new path material; you can see where the path under the pines comes out to the right of the shed. One of my big winter losses was all the Jack Frost brunneras that used to make a swath of silver where the path came out from under the trees - not sure yet what I will plant in their stead....
{{gwi:229521}}

It doesn't take long for the plants to soften all those straight lines once they get growing in spring. The straight lines then just provide views deeper into the garden and, I think, help make the space look bigger than it is.