Thanks for adding your suggestions, Renee! And gypsy, I think your garden is lovely, don't sell yourself short! And thank you Renee for your kind comments. It is such a pretty, pretty area of our yard, and my husband is on board for it to stay formal. And yes, these rose trees are breathtaking. Every year the perform better and better. They are nearly 8 feet in diameter right now . We're going to have to re-stake them. Again. With something really massive, lol! House is sort of a beige with medium brown trim. Sounds ugly, but it is sort ofTuscan in its style, and it's a nice neutral color. Here's an old photo of the house (much more landscaping and fruit trees, now). My formal garden area is on the left side of the house: Colors for the flowering plants. Thinking purple (have some variegated lavender colored iris that will stay, just need to be dug up and repositioned), pink and white. And some silver foliage and green foliage. The lavender I was thinking of using is Lavandula angustifolia 'Thumbelina Leigh'. Very nice, well behaved, very rich green foliage and deep blue purple flower heads. Plus, it is very fragrant. I have found this to be one of the very best lavenders for small spaces, just has so many great qualities. I was also thinking of maybe using some Dianthus? I found these 'Super Trouper' in a fuschia pink, which I think would be a nice color accent. Foliage is silvery: White Meidiland roses would be great. Or some white rose. I have a lone 'Glamis Castle' that looks gorgeous below the 'Red Fairy' tree rose. So, yes, white roses would be very pretty. I'd love to have any DA rose, so I might try to mix and match pink, purple and white DA's in the middle of the triangles. For the shady areas, I could go with a white Kalanchoe, or a white begonia with the Hellebores. The shady area is much more difficult to plant. Patty S. This post was edited by hoosierquilt on Mon, May 20, 13 at 18:44

We don't have dogs of our own only cats and fish. We live in the city and the "parkway strip" although it belongs to the city because of access to water and gas stuff most gardeners plant it up with something if only grass. We are trying to have grass. Two people down the street insist on walking with their two dogs on our strip of grass. We have asked them nicely to please keep their dogs off the grass. their response - "It's not your property it belongs to the city you don't pay taxes on it" Who do they think plants the grass and mows it and waters it? I'm all for planting cactus. My husband is determined to have grass. These two jerks have trained their dogs to use our grass and trees as fire hydrants and they get a big kick out of it when their dogs kick all the mulch onto the sidewalk for us to clean up. I'm afraid that my husband is going to have a stroke literally. He now has to take valium to get to sleep because they have him so worked up. Any suggestions short of shoting these two jerks? Thanks, Rosalie

Voles aren't always a problem. We moved here in 1999 and had a great hunter cat---a young male domestic shorthair named Moose who killed gophers, moles, voles and field mice and brought his kills to us to proudly show off. In fact, he'd bring them through the dog door in the laundry room, take them into the walk-in pantry and line them up on the floor. I can laugh about it now, but I was really irritated when he first started bringing dead rodent type animals into the house. We got rid of the dog door ASAP. I sure do miss him now. We didn't start developing an actual vole problem inside the garden, as far as I know, until the drought of 2011, so even though our woods are full of pine voles, they stayed away from the adjacent garden for many years, even after Moose went to kitty cat heaven. You might get lucky and not have a vole problem at all, so why not wait and see if one develops? The first couple of years, I was hoping that after the drought ended, the voles would go back to the woods and stay there, but by then it seems they had developed a real affection for potatoes, sweet potatoes and carrots, as well as the roots of many flowers, fruit trees and some legumes. I just used a castor oil-based mole/gopher repellent to repel them, reapplying it after heavy rainfall, and didn't start lining new raised beds with hardware cloth until they decided to stay in the garden and eat potatoes. I think that was the summer of 2013, which also is the year they started eating the roots of our fig trees. Even now, only two raised beds (one for potatoes and one for sweet potatoes) are lined with hardware cloth because that's all they really bother in the front garden. I'd like to get the bed where I raise onions some years lined with hardware cloth as well, but the thought of digging out all the soil in a bed that is 200 square feet is daunting, given that rain has been falling regularly all autumn and all winter long and we have been muddy nonstop. I don't mind digging dry soil, but I'm not touching the well-amended clay while it is wet. Even well-amended clay is still clay and if you dig it wet you're going to get clods when it dries. And, if I am ever to rotate root crops with other items, I'll have to line other beds with hardware cloth. I know I should do them all, but I hate disturbing the soil by digging it up if I don't have to, so maybe I'll just wait and see if the voles become more of a problem. or if they don't. I don't know if voles will bother onions. I've left the perennial onions and the garlic in beds all winter that aren't lined with hardware cloth and nothing's ever bothered them. Have you had voles show up at all yet or are you trying to guess what happens next? Gophers popped up out of the sandy soil areas around Thackerville these last couple of weeks. In some places they are so horrible----I don't think you could walk through the area with gopher mounds without stepping on a mound----they are that numerous and that close together. I don't know how anyone down there has a garden or farm crop at all with all those gophers, but there are some successful farmers and quite a few successful gardeners (and tons of ranchers) down there. We never had moles or gophers come back here after Moose wiped them out well over a decade ago. In the back garden, the voles went on a tear and started eating southern pea plant ones, one plant per night for several weeks. There are no raised beds back there as that is a newer garden plot, and I never intended to build raised beds in its sandier soil. I'm contemplating turning most of it into a forest garden, with the fruit tree and berry bramble roots enclosed in gopher cages to help keep the voles from eating them before those plants can become established. It would be easier to plant perennial plants back there with root protection than to fight the voles with annual plants every year. It isn't the original plan I had for that area, but may end up being the best use for that space. The truth is that no matter how hard we try, we're always going to have wild creatures working hard to get into our gardens. I just plant enough extra plants (going for that lush, overcrowded look) that the wild things can get a few plants and it isn't the end of the world. I like watching the wildlife that shares this land with us----I'd just rather not have them take more than their share of our crops. Bon, We sow a little winter rye grass seed here and there most years (some years we overseed the entire lawn area with it, though more for fire protection than to provide rabbit food) and the bunnies visit it every evening and every morning. We let it get tall and lush for them in winter and they even wear out little bunny trails as they travel to and from their favorite spots to feed. They also eat the clover that we grow behind the barn, as well as some of the winter weeds that pop up here and there in the yard and pastures/meadows. If we had incredibly harsh cold weather that browns out all the green winter grasses/forbs, I just put out little piles of hen scratch for them at night. The down side to ensuring that the rabbits are well-fed is that other animals then show up to prey upon them, but that is life in every ecosystem----everybody/everything eats something and everybody/everything is eaten by something. Sometimes the Food Web is cruel.

This is not the right place for that question -) This forum is intended for discussions or suggestions about ways to improve the website. I would suggest you move it to one of the plant specific forums but it is just as easy to answer it here........there are NO plants that repel cats or dogs!! Or deer. There are some plants that can deter them from entering your garden or at least slow them down but 'deter' is a very different concept from 'repel'. These would be plants - like the barberry or roses or other thorny items - that you could put on your side of the arborvitaes, but that wouldn't stop the dog from digging or running on the other side. And to keep dogs out of your yard completely, you would need to plant a solid hedge of them all around your property. But then again, a fence would do the exact same thing. But there is no plant that just by scent or something similar that would "repel" dogs cats or deer.