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I live in a little row-house in the Brookland neigborhood of the District of Columbia with my husband and our year old Shlabusky dog "Roofus."

Last Fall we began tearing up the previous owner's plants, which were huge space-choking pine trees and shrubs. We have a regular rowhouse front yard (tiny/small) so these plantings were ridiculous and unneighborly. The minute we cut things down we began to get compliments from our neighbors.

Along the house we've planted a bed of shade plants and a paperbark maple )(acer griseum) we've named "Hannah." It has very beautiful orange/red leaves in the fall.

In the front of the yard we planted a bed of combination herbs and flowers. Three types of basil, rosemary, echinacea, guara, and salvia. The herb/flower bed out front was previously occupied by a huge thorny pyrocanthus bush/hedge which I had nicknamed "the bush of evil." When we pulled that out we discovered this behemoth had been hogging up one of the sunniest patches on our property! We have since had such great success with that bed that we are planning on taking out the square of grass (actually more clover than grass) and making the whole front yard a garden bed with small stone paths.

I am mainly interested in people's experience gardening in small spaces like rowhouse yards, which are very small and demand ingenuous growing.