Maybe someone can help me out here . . . can dogwood take dry conditions at all? If so, if it were my house, I imagine I would plant a dogwood. There are many kinds. They look nice all the time, especially in winter when the red- or yellow-stemmed ones add some color in the whiteness. I know they can take shade, and maybe if they were mulched they could take dry as well? You can post photos (if you have them) by hosting them on Picasaweb or Photobucket and copying the text to embed the image (in Picasa it's called "embed imgage", I believe). Just in case you would like to.

Tina, I don't have my tree/shrub book in front of me(Pirrone) - I keep it at the library. But I want to say that your shrub is a Purple Sand Cherry and the insect that chews the holes is a wasp. I treat trees and shrubs and do not really have control over this problem. I also see it on Newport Plum - similar tree. It really is more of a cosmetic problem and will not kill the shrub like the borers that it OFTEN gets. A similar shrub I recommend as a replacement for Sand Cherries is a Diablo Ninebark - so far NO insects or diseases. So I really wouldn't worry about it- your shrub should be fine.

Ideally I'd think you want a variety of shrubs, evergreen and deciduous, rather than a row of one thing. You can plant perennials in between to give you a bit more privacy during the summer. A rambling rose would be nice. Red-twig dogwood (I like the one with the variegated leaf), yellow-twig dogwood, shrub roses, all kinds of vibernum, hydrangeas, azaleas (The species azaleas have a particularly nice open form), spireas, choysias. . . Underplant with hostas and interesting ground covers. With a little planning you can have something in bloom or displaying berries or colored foliage pretty much all year 'round. If you want to go with native plants consider Oregon grape (the berries are edible), flowering currant (ditto), mock orange, Nootka rose, salal, high bush cranberry, native rhodies, spirea densiflora, evergreen huckleberries.

I take a mixed planting approach to the garden here - trees, shrubs, perennials, vines, bulbs - everything has a place here and most beds have a mix of things in them. I grew up in rural southern New Brunswick, 'next door' to Maine so a somewhat similar geography and natural landscape/ecology to where you are. I think that significantly affected my garden aesthetic, having lived on my maternal grandparents farm-gradually-going-back-to-bush (Grandpa was 80 when I was born and lived into his mid-90s, always working outdoors on the property.) Looking back with adult eyes, the whole place was a natural wild garden and there was always a mixture of plant types everywhere - but everything had a reason for being where it was and everything fit together. At first unconsciously and now deliberately, I use that reference landscape and the lessons it taught me, to plant and arrange the garden here. Shrubs in the garden here are placed where the conditions suit them re light and soil etc., but also where they fit with what I want the garden to look like. For example, the hydrangeas here mostly bloom white - because that is a primary color theme in many areas of the garden. The one that fades to pink is also near other plants that bloom in pink - not necessarily at the same time as the hydrangea, but the hydrangea's pink phase continues an established color theme for that space. A shrub can extend the color higher in three dimensional space than many perennials would. Shrubs can provide a support for vines to grow through - mainly clematises here. For example, a large variegated weigela adds height, a long season of interest due to the green and white leaves, pink flowers - that are later followed by pink clematis flowers from a vine that grow up through the shrub. The green and white variegation is picked up/repeated in the white flowering tall hydrangeas along the garage, the 'Emerald Gaiety' euonymus in several places in the front garden, the 'Carol Mackie' daphne elsewhere in the same bed, etc.... None of the variegated plants are close to each other but the green and white often with pink, repeats itself around the garden area for most of the season in different forms, heights, and spaces in three dimensions. Basically, I think of what I want the overall space to look/feel like and choose plants - of whatever kind - to fit into the picture to fill all the available space in three dimensions. I certainly didn't start gardening that way - at first I was mainly interested in interesting plants. But as time went on and I read more about garden history, design, famous gardens, etc. I started thinking more closely about what I liked and why. That led me to make more deliberate choices about arranging the space and plants in the garden. Even after all this time, I still experiment to figure out what works best for me (see my comments on the lily beetle thread about the failure of my idea to plant euonymus on the arbour in the front bed!) So my advice is to think about the big picture you're aiming for, experiment, expect some failures but don't 'beat yourself up' about them - learn from them. Remember the saying 'it's about the journey more than the destination' - but it's important to have the destination in mind as a goal that directs the journey!