Just my opinion but I guess it would depend on what look she wants. If she wants it to appear more uniform then put the taller shrubs on the lower end. Personal preference here, but for myself I would probably accentuate the slope by planting the taller shrubs on the higher end of the slope. Another thing to consider, would having taller shrubs near the driveway block any sight lines causing safety issues?

From a design point of view, it sounds like you might want the shrubs to
graduate in height. . .so the simple solution is to select shrubs that are all
essentially the same height - the naturally steep grade will take care of graduation. Uniformity never worked for me. . .which is why I don't have
one of those perfect little boxwood hedged gardens. :-)

This is a pretty lame answer, but a shrub border has SO many variables and
I need pictures !!! Bring a detailed elevation and three pages of specs to the
swap and we'll "chat". . .

Carl

Sounds a lot like my backyard. My garden is highest in the middle, consistently slopes downward, has a somewhat steeper slope (dropping a good 3 feet in a couple feet) about two thirds of the way to the property line, is lower on both sides, but quite a lot lower on one side than the other. I put taller shrubs on the low side, shorter ones on the high side.

BUT, I also had much different drainage conditions from one side to the other. If this is true for your friend's situation, then I believe the height of the shrubs is probably only a minor consideration.

In my garden the high side has much better drainage, the low side holds water & sometimes lies in water. Plantings had to be quite different from side to side. Both sides are in full sun. For example, the center of the yard and part of the left lower side will grow a pine, the low areas on the right will kill a pine in one season. Finding deciduous plants & shrubs to suit both sides was fairly easy, finding evergreens in my climate was not.

Since I didn't want to lose a lot of money experimenting with expensive shrubs and trees for the "wet garden" and a lot of the water loving ones get much too large for my smallish space and I'm a plantaholic anyway, the very low right side has more perennials than the left side, where I have a few shrub roses among the pines, daylilies, and grasses. (BTW, Itea & Clethra will grow on both sides).

The perennials on the lowest side, such as water loving iris, are interspersed with a lot of cheap thicketing shrubs, like red twigs, and only a few tall arborvitaes (up the slope somewhat, where it is not too wet) for winter color and to balance the small rounded pines on the other side. Thus the height was more a function of what would grow well where.

I mostly used color to unify the area, using a Blue Montgomery Spruce, 3 Crimson Pigmy Barberries, a Purple Leaf Sand Cherry & Purple Smokebush on one side & another Blue Montgomery Spruce, 3 more CP Barberries & 2 Physocarpus Diablo (which tolerate wet clay quite well) on the other side (toward the higher middle for drainage reasons) with a lot of red blooming perennials (quite different ones) on each side. I also used some tall grasses in place of shrubs in both areas, dry & wet and even planted bulbs on both sides, daffodils on the higher side and camassia on the other.

Despite the fact that the spaces were different in size, I used a very similar bed shape on each side, trying for some additional symmetry that way, since the plantings were so different. Hope this gives you some ideas of the issues you can have with slopes and dropoffs.

Thank you all for your input! Carl, unfortunately I can't make it to the swap. :( I had actually considered bringing a photo of yet another area I need help with, lol, but since I won't be there that won't work, for either that spot or this one.

I will try to get a photo though, and post it. I had toyed with that idea yesterday when originally posting, because I know I like to see visuals when others ask questions. Helps me to know what they are talking about.

Good point(s) Leslie, and I had indeed (briefly) considered the moisture levels in this bed. While there is a slight difference, I think, from the high side to the low, I don't think it's different enough to worry too much about which goes where, unless it's a shrub that has very specific moisture needs. This friend already has a very wet garden in which we have several of the plants you mentioned. This bed is much drier than that one, even on the low end. Yours sounds like a much bigger bed than mine, so the differences in moisture from one end to the other may be bigger.

At this point, I'm just pulling my hair out trying to decide what to put in here. I'm so sick of the varying descriptions one finds. I can look at five different sites/catalogs and get five different size descriptions for the same shrub. Since this is such a small bed, and since it is in such a visible spot, I really need to have reliable size descriptions for the shrubs I'm putting in. Very frustrating! And I need things that are taller than they are wide - upon researching, I'm amazed at how wide some of these shrubs are. Who knew? Not me, lol!

Thanks for your ideas. I'll try to post a photo later today.

:)
Dee

Okay, I've got some photos:

I guess I should have taken some from a more head-on position, but I wanted to show the slope and the relation to the driveway
{{gwi:272451}}

{{gwi:272452}}

As you can probably make out, to the right of all that vinca (ugh!) is a swath of wood chips, laid down where the ground started to slope. So this is not really planting space.

{{gwi:272453}}

There used to be some huge hostas in this bed (you can see some remnants). But when my friend took out two small trees that were behind this bed, I guess there was too much sun for the hostas and they just kind of faded away over the last two years. It was after the trees were taken out that the jungle started to appear.

{{gwi:272454}}

I guess the difference from the left side of the bed (higher ground) to the right (lower ground) is not as much as I thought, maybe only about two feet, if even that. By the way, that iris in bloom was a nice surprise this morning!

Hope this helps with my question. And if anyone has any suggestions for some narrow shrubs about 6 to 8 feet tall, preferably evergreen but not necessarily so, please feel free to suggest away! I can perhaps extend the bed out a little bit, maybe a foot, but not more than that as to keep the curve if I come out much more I will hit the driveway. As it is now, at its narrowest point there is only about two feet between the bed and the driveway at the lower end.

Also, the bed is maybe 20 feet wide. I may extend it a bit to the left, just to try to help hide the jungle there,and give the bed a definite, obvious start with a shrub on the end (beginning?). We also hope to *try* to keep on top of those weeds a bit more.

Thanks,
Dee

P.S. In this bed now are chrysanthemums, biokovo geraniums, iberis, irises and two small clumps of daylilies. There used to be lilies which were gorgeous but disappeared(??). Oh, and lots of vinca...

Hi Dee, looking at the photos, I can see the problem you are dealing with. It really is a deceiving slope from one direction. It is steeper than it looks.

That slope is steep enough, that the difference in moisture would be significant from the top to the bottom of it. Although your description that it is dry at the top and the bottom, makes me think the slope continues and the water travels to a lower spot. Not sure from the photos, where the water would collect but it must end up somewhere. After the awful dry summer we had this year and taking into consideration, rain runoff, I would want to make sure they would get enough water. Some of my shrubs really burned up this year even with weekly watering, even on level ground. Shrubs in dry soil conditions are always giving me a significant watering problem and that is in part shade, not full sun. Can't tell if you have full sun there or not. Is there any thought to conserving the water on the property to avoid run off?

You might want to use the Weston Nurseries site to find what you are looking for. They have a good advanced search for plants. Link below.

You could also check out the University of Connecticut site. They have a good search feature too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Weston Nurseries Plant Search

But on second thought, some of my dryness issues are from surrounding tree roots. I would imagine that whatever has been growing there already, must give an indication of how dry the conditions are. Why did she remove the trees?

Hi PM2! She removed the trees because I believe they were dying. One was definitely just an old scrub tree; I believe the other was an oak or a maple. Not very big, but for some reason was possibly diseased? I'm not sure, but since she has a large natural area, I'm assuming removal was for a specific reason other than cosmetic (well, the scrub tree may have been cosmetic, but again, this area is in a fairly natural state, so I'm sure the removal of the bigger tree was for a good reason).

The lower end of the bed really isn't *that* much moister than the upper level, and the reason for this is that the bed drops off dramatically in the other direction, to the rear of the bed. That layer of woodchips is a good 8 to 12 inches in depth in some places, perhaps even more. We laid them down to help act as a buffer between the weeds, to help give some erosion control, and also to help with access for maintenance on the bed (like I said, there were hostas in there and we did need access at the time, lol). Now it helps with access to get in there and keep the weeds at bay!

To kind of give a lame virtual tour, lol, if you were to walk to the lower end of the bed near the driveway (say, from the second-to-last photo above) you would walk around the end of the bed and see this, which some of you may remember from previous posts (and you can see the ruts in the ground from the lawn service - the ground is so wet that they would always leave ruts):

{{gwi:272455}}

At the bottom of the hill behind this driveway bed is this:

{{gwi:272456}}

Which is anyone recalls had standing water (brown area at the base of the jewelweed in the photo)

{{gwi:272457}}

And which now looks kind of like this (but add in, to the left, more plants and lots more weeds at the moment, lol!)

{{gwi:272458}}

So anyway, that is where all the water goes to, and so the driveway bed is actually on the dry side. I am expecting to have to water until established and until the soil is better, as well as using a good layer of mulch. Sun exposure is about 5 to 6 hours of afternoon sun, maybe 11 to 5pm-ish.

Thanks for the recommended sites. I'll take a look and see what I can find.

Thanks!
:)
Dee

Ok, now that makes a lot more sense to me to see where the water collects. It just keeps traveling away from that bed you are working on and collects when it reaches a stopping place.

So, with 5-6hrs of afternoon sun, it sounds like pretty average conditions. I wish I could offer more evergreen suggestions, but I haven't added that many to my garden that are not the usual that you would have considered already. I've added one narrow Juniper that should top out about 15 ft maybe, that is now about 7ft. I don't think this is a great variety so I don't recommend it. I'm sure there are other Junipers that might be a good choice though. I have two Arborvitae, One is Green Gem and the other is a Western variety that I prefer. I'm sure that will get larger and wider than you need. I have the usual Taxus 'Hicksii' variety that is supposed to get taller than wide. Broadleaf evergreens, azaleas, rhodies, and pieris that don't sound like what you are looking for. I do like boxwood and hollies and I have added a couple of 'Sky Pencil' which is a narrow, 12ft tall x 3 ft wide eventually. I saw a full grown one the other day and thought it was quite handsome. Blue Hollies are so bulletproof to me, but you might have to keep it pruned for that space?

That's all I got! lol I know there are tons of actual 'evergreen' conifers that someone else might offer suggestions on.

Thanks for all your help, PM2. I actually tried a Sky Pencil once, between my garage doors, but it didn't make it through it's second winter. I didn't think of it for this spot because I thought it might be *too* narrow, but then again didn't know they got that big. Perhaps with the right combination...

I too was thinking of a blue holly, but I'm so afraid of pruning, lol...

Thanks for your help!
:)
Dee

Dee, this will be my second winter coming up. Fingers crossed.

Yes, I saw the mature or almost mature 'Sky Pencil' at Stonegate Gardens in MA about 3 weeks ago. You could call them and ask them to take a phone photo of it with a person standing next to it and email it to you. [g] I was very surprised at how large it was. Tall and full and pretty much about 3ft wide. If you lost one though, I suppose it makes it iffy and why do that. So, I'm not trying to encourage you in that direction, just think that most people who consider a Sky Pencil have not seen a mature specimen and just wanted to put it out there.

Yes, a grouping of narrow shrubs might work too. And the holly, well, mine gets a haircut once a year almost every year. I don't mind. I tried to go without pruning the first few years and found it to be too loose. I read about tip pruning making them more dense and tried that and it worked great.

Well...good luck...hope you'll get more responses, here or on the Shrubs forum.