Well, let me start by saying that I don't have a mailbox like that, so my opinions are exactly that - opinions - and no more. I think you have a point when you say they don't look great growing out of the grass. But they don't make really convincing flowers either :-) What a mailbox garden in an otherwise plain yard says to me is "I couldn't think of anywhere else to put a flowerbed." That said, if having a mailbox garden is important to your wife, it doesn't seem worth having a war over. They can be cute, and they are actually a bit of an American cultural icon :-) An image search brings up lots of ideas for them by the way, including a charming row of mailboxes springing up out of the grass - but it seems to me that mailboxes have a function. I would think that function is best served if you have a brick pad around/beside it to stand on, which would also make mowing around it easier. Maybe a brick or paver pad, or even a 24" x 24" slab, with the flowers adjacent and good edging in a nicely shaped bed would be the best of all worlds. For my taste, a bed without hardscape always looks a bit accidental (unless it has really crisp edges). I always say that landscape design is for people, and so what constitutes good design in each place depends on who lives there. We, and the renegade gardener, can only give some objective guidelines, which if followed slavishly in all cases would create their own kind of undesirable outcome. So your landscape should definitely reflect your preferences. I'm also not a foundation planting guru - I prefer no foundation planting in the vast majority of cases - but let me take a stab at the problem with yours. I remember in an old thread, our guru Laag saying that a dark-foliaged plant reads in the landscape as a dark hole, or something to that effect, and gave as a solution something about backing it with something green. So one possibility is that the purple foliage is itself the problem. Only in this case, maybe if you put something bright green in front of it, using the barberries as a background, they might look better - deepening the bed to accommodate another layer of planting. You could also consider extending the foundation planting as far to the left as an antidote. Maybe move a barberry beyond the house corner. It looks on the aerial view as if you have some space there. But if you do that I would actually shift the planting weight away from the front door. The other general idea I was hoping you might pick up from those threads I linked earlier was about creating space in front of a recessed doorway instead of shutting it in. You have a fair bit going on there - I don't like what's in the middle either. But somehow what really bugs me here is that you have two uneven sections of your house, the garage one and the one to the left of the door. The one to the left of the door is smaller already, and your planting is hiding more of it; your tree will later do more of the same. That's why I would rather be able to see (or at least discern) the foundation of that section. And in contrast, the plantings on the garage side do such an inadequate job of hiding any of its mass that they look a bit... incongruous. They have no hope. They do not begin to address the blank mass over the garage door, which I think is what needs... screening, disguising, balancing... things that plants may not be able to do here (your tree on the right will maybe do it later). I don't know all the things that a person can do with that wall. Perhaps a little rooflet to match the one over the window on the right? A section of grey siding? Out of my realm there, but you get the idea. But in pursuit of having plants help with it, I would draw the bed on the right up toward the house instead of down to the driveway entrance. That will also maintain better sightlines for driveway egress. KarinL

Move when leafless. Take bare-rooted, get as much of the root system as possible instead of trying to move intact soil balls. Leafless . . . that probably means waiting an extra couple of weeks, which I thought might be good. I'll just have to convince my better half that we're better off waiting. Why do you say we shouldn't try to move a soil ball? It won't be that large and my intention was just to wrap it in plastic or put it in a pot/bucket for the 25 minute drive to its new home. Seedlings of 'Bloodgood' are not entitled to the name. They will instead be unnamed red-leaved Japanese maple seedlings. I can't have that. He'll need a name. Perhaps Jonas, or possibly Franklin. I don't really care if it's exactly the same variety or not; the only thing I find particularly nice about my dad's tree is that it has a very interesting trunk. Otherwise I don't know that I find Bloodgoods to be all that special anyway.

LOL!! lanna, if that amount of water was fine, then you would not have a problem with the leaves crisping and dying. It doesn't matter if the tree is large or not, 5 minutes a day is NOT getting the water far enough down into the soil profile to be of sufficient benefit to the roots. Japanese maples, well established or not, are not the slightest bit drought tolerant and young trees even less so. Just try less frequent but longer watering intervals and see if things perk up. Drought stress on JM's can be quite cumulative and not show all signs immediately. Just because the cambium is still green now does not mean that tree cannot succumb from drought over time. Also, any kind of stressor on JM's - like drought - leaves the trees prone to opportunistic pathogens, like Verticillium wilt. I can't stress this enough - it really DOES make a huge difference on how one waters plants in the landscape!!

Rocks will just collect all manner of debris, are hard to clean debris out of and will invariably sprout weeds....that are also hard to remove. A bark mulch is a much better idea, both for of ease of maintenance and for soil improvement as it slowly degrades. It just has to be refreshed/topped off every so often.