I am relatively sure that you have two spirea (the lime colored ones) and two potentilla. It is a vining clematis on the very end and will need a trellis. The easiest thing to do is go to a nursery or big box store and look at the metal trellises they have since clematis can't wrap around the larger diameter of a wood trellis unless you cover them with wire. Something like what cearbhaill used for the mandevilla vines would be fine, but might need to be bigger if the clematis is one of the larger ones. (and despite the often repeated idea that clems like shaded roots, they don't need shade on their roots, just adequate moisture and some mulch to keep the moisture even. They prefer not to have root competition, so I'd keep groundcovers away from them. Spirea take well to hard pruning. I have two that are close enough to the house that they often get squashed during the winter by globs of snow falling from the eaves. I prune them down to a few inches and within a week they are putting out new growth that looks clean and symmetrical. I don't have potentilla, so I can't help with advice on those. Good choice to remove the spruce that was too close to the house. I'd put in a perennial or two there. In the area of the electric meter, you want to leave the meter reader room to see the meter. I might well plant a large pot and place it there, rather like cearbhaill did along the wall behind the pool with some bushy and draping plants in it. You could also add a trellis near the front corner to let your vine (honeysuckle?) grow around the corner. I'd probably plant a groundcover as well to help fill in some of the area between the shrubs. I can see something low with yellow flowers in your photo, but don't know if that was planted there on purpose. As at least one other person mentioned, you may at some point want to take up the sidewalk and move it farther from the house so that you have a more reasonably sized planting bed. Five feet is wide enough so that plants won't encroach on the walkway and will leave you room to paint behind them, but I like beds wider than that so I can plant several layers of plants and have something of interest going on most of the year. Alternatively, you add a wide bed on the far side of the walkway so that the walk goes through a garden rather than defining your garden bed.

Laura, IDNR sells a book called A Field Guide to the Wetlands of Illinois. It's not as comprehensive as I'd like to see but at least it is specific to our area and it's only $12.00. The book talks about the different types of wetlands and what plants are found in each type. There's a link below to an IDNR page selling the book. Here is a link that might be useful: WetlandsField Guide

Nice... I like what you did w/ the rocks. I have a similar situation in my front yard because of poor grading. Water collects so I decided to make it a bog. I was digging and hit a table of water but decided not to go for a pond... I was already overwhelmed with the bog. Yours looks like. You in NC? Me too.

Witz, If you post this over on the pond forum, you might get more responses. A few of the ponders there (including myself) have "bog-type" filters. This Bog Garden forum (I think) deals more with the "true" bogs-- that is, separate bogs filled with peat that don't usually have water running through them. In the meantime you can take a look at the construction of my bog-type filter at the link below. BTW- we used all pea gravel-- no lava rock in our filter and it seems to be doing well after 2.5 years. Another website that might be useful is Nelson's Water Gardens in TX, I think. Just google their name along with "bog filter". Here is a link that might be useful: Our Bog Filter