By 'under the sage' I mean between and around the bases of the sage plants.. When the bulbs start blooming they will be under where the top growth of the sage is (or was, before you cut it back...) The early crocuses may be mostly finished blooming by the time you cut the sage back, but the anemones bloom a bit later so they are visible after the sage is cut back. When you buy the bulbs in the fall, look for crocuses that say 'mid season' or 'late' if you can find them, so they will still be in bloom after the sage is cut back. Crocuses and Anemone Blanda are easy to find in bulk bags in 'big box' stores in the fall so they are relatively inexpensive. You could buy a wide variety of small bulbs. Check the recommended planting depth and buy ones with the same planting depth required. Then you can mix them all together in a bucket and choose a bulb at random when you plant them. That way you get a nice natural mix of colors and shapes. The small bulbs only need to go a couple of inches deep so are easier to plant than tulips and daffodils that need to go at least 6" deep! Plant lots of the little bulbs for a good display. You could use any (bigger) rocks you dig up as a low ornamental wall at the base of the slope. Thyme looks good spilling over rocks. When you plant, I'd be inclined to place things like daylilies and other perennials, and potentilla shrubs (if you're planting them) first. Then plant thyme on the lower 1/3-1/4 of the slope. Then fill in at the top and around the shrubs and perennials with the sage. Thyme looks good spilling out from under the sage. If it is planted in between the sage plants, the sage might shade it a bit too much. If the thyme is happy, it will move into vacant spaces on its own. Garlic and/or onion chives are nice ornamental and edible additions that can be tucked into a few places. Beware though of more aggressive spreading herbs like mints and oregano (a mint relative) because they will spread from the roots as well as seed a round. Beware of Lemon Balm for the same reason. Do you have kids? Kids tend to like the herb scents. You might want to add a plant or two of lemon thyme and orange-scented thyme. They are less vigorous than ordinary thyme so it's best to limit them to just a couple of fun specimens and let the ordinary thyme be the groundcover.

Jean - Thanks. I knew that the new daylilies in the planterbox would not do much this spring. But I can just immagine it in my mind that it will be looking fanastic next bloom season. Andrea- I have six butterfly bushes and I cut them way, way back early each spring. Otherwise they would take over the world. This is actually one of the smaller butterfly bushes but my favorite color of the ones that I have. Vickie- That row of hedges on the left side I put in about 6 years ago. The half round planterboxes (at least the big ones) were there for afew years. Otherwise I started that left side last spring. I put that low stacked stone retaining wall in last spring that runs accross the entire front. On the right side, the topmost curved terrace was done in 2007 and the daylilies and roses in that terrace section went in that spring. The foribundaville rose garden on the right was already there, at least it was started but not as finished as it is now. The planterbox went in last fall and was only planted this spring. Cindy- I can not plant anything in the sidwalk strip. First off dog walkers many times each day. Fortunately we have a pooper scooper law here. Second cars park all along in front of the house constantly and if it were planted, it would be impossible to open the passenger door and step out. We have a 16 acre park directly accross the street for where I am. There are no nightbors on the other side of the street. There are however, lots of walkers and cars that slow down to look at the garden.

I grew up in a somewhat rural/somewhat suburban town in SE Michigan, with a lake down the street (and 7 others just in my town) and woods behind the house. I was a sort of mermaid-wood nymph. It was awesome. We are very urban now, just 1 mile from the border of Chicago, with an expressway and an elevated train half a block away. The kids do their best with our yards, treating 4 front yards as one long playing strip (we are all friends in those 4 houses) and going a few blocks to the school if they need a field. It works well enough. So yeah, we do have to be mindful of that when planting. The house I grew up in had several trees in the front yard, but the yard was so big it didn't matter. Our current house had bushes along *both* property lines when we moved in, but we removed the ones separating our yard from the other yard with kids (the opposite house, that is in danger of being eaten by its tree, has no kids). kitasei: when you say "yours may be an Olmsted," do you mean the sapling? I would be very impressed if anyone could identify that tiny tree at this point. I have no idea what it is. When they took out our ash, we put ourselves on the "new tree list" and 6 months later came home to a sapling. I think they are being careful about what they plant now, having found out in hindsight that planting a row of just one kind of tree is a very bad decision. I still miss the tree canopy. It was beautiful. I also had another look at the parkway and don't think there is enough space for an additional tree, because of the placement of our neighbor's tree (you can't see the tree in the pic but you can see the shadow) and the tiny sidewalk to the street. I will make do. At least the sapling is kind of in front of our house. Down the block, where 2 neighbors' mature but dying trees were taken down, the parkway sapling got planted in front of the 2 houses' side yards. Those 2 houses are essentially sharing a tree, which won't provide much shade for either house as it grows. That's unfortunate, but it was the only place on the parkway they could plant a new tree because of where the other 2 had been.

When trimming, keep in mind that this is a matched set of “bookends,” so they should be exact, mirror image duplicates of each other as much as possible. I would think of the trimming project as a challenge … as if you were involved in a manufacturing process making a machine project on a lathe or something along those lines. It would not be at all detrimental to use a tape measure to double check dimensions for matching throughout the process. I would rough out the shapes of both before fine tuning either. The place to begin is standing back well away from them trying to envision what they are to become. If the shrub needs to be moved a little left, right or forward, this is the time to notice it and account for the adjustments you’ll need to make in the cutting. It really barely matters where the plant roots are located. If you the shrub to be 4” to the right, “move” it there with the cutting process. It’s important to envision the finished product before cutting because there is a substantial part of them that won’t get any cutting at all. If you just charged up on them and started hacking away, there’s a good chance you’d cut some wrong parts off. Since the pair of shrubs are matched, the first cuts to make should determine the height. (To match the pair, follow a line on the siding of the house as a guide. Don’t measure from the ground.) Keep in mind that you do NOT want to cut at the place where you envision the limits of the finished product to be (the red line in picture.) There are three reasons for this. As soon as you finish cutting the plant it’s going to grow and if you cut it at the finished height, in a short time it will grow too large. The second reason is because, even though you tried hard to make it a perfect shape, it’s not going to end up as perfect as you’d hoped for. Later, when you need to trim and try to perfect it again, you will want to be cutting only in the newer, softer, easier-to-cut foliage, rather than in the hard, sticky, woody portion. If you don’t cut a little smaller in the first place, you’ll probably end up where the next cutting has to dip somewhere into the woody portion of the plant again. This is a royal pain. If you make the plant a little smaller to begin with, it gives you a “cushion” against having this happen. In general, I find that people have a strong resistance to cutting the plant smaller (the blue line in the picture.) But do yourself a favor and get over this. If you mistakenly cut this plant to a stub, in two years you’d barely remember your error because it would be pretty large again. In cutting it just 6” less than you want it to be, in two months you’ll barely remember or notice that you did that. The third reason you want to cut the plant a little smaller than the “finished product size” is because the more foliage you remove from the top portion of the plant, the greater it is that you expose the bottom portion (the part that is undercut and desperately needs to grow) to more light and an improved chance of quicker growth. Between the yellow line (which represents the ground plane) in the picture and the shrub, there is nothing at all to cut … until you get higher up to the blue line. At this cavity at the lower portion of the shrubs, all the foliage will be left untouched so it can continue to grow as quickly as possible. The goal is to keep the upper portions of the shrub trimmed so that it shades the lower portions the least as possible. Even if you want the shrubs to be larger than what I'm showing, for now you should trim them as I'm showing because you're in a corrective phase trying to regain the lost lower foliage. In your second-to-last picture, it shows how a subordinate, adjacent shrub has encroached on the Yew, which is clearly the more important shrub. The lesser shrub should be trimmed such that this doesn't happen.