I had a hoop garden once on the parkway. We planted annuals in them and had thyme between the hoops. It was a fun garden.

It's so nice to see these pictures on a day like today ! Your monarda combo is so pretty. I'm going to keep that in mind when we can finally buy plants again. I think your pic of the arch with the pathway is just perfect! And it's awesome to see your overall view , sometimes it's hard to picture a whole garden piece by piece. So lovely!

Plan! 1. Continually assess for future cramming. The next couple years will still be very busy in this regard. This Spring for example, I sold, traded or moved over 300 specimens. 2. Allow those that mix well to 'grow into' eachother. As long as the plants are very slow growers, or only have minor 'collisions', I'll happily allow them to 'mesh' together i.e. nature. This will take a lot of thinking and planning, but considering how much effort I've put into the first two years of gardening, I feel more then up to the challenge. 3. Any VERY large specimens that can't stay will go to a local botanical garden, with whom I am partners with. I'll either be paid in cash or in trade(more plants!) with which I can sell or plant at friends, neighbors, etc. The botanical garden is over 90 acres, so we have a lot of space to use and he's already asked me to plan for a future 'conifer walk', a 5-10 acre section full of mainly large dwarves and other larger conifers where visitors can walk a series of windy paths through these wonderful plants. 4. Some plants *will* have to be removed, outright to conifer heaven as Ken likes to say. The idea here is that I can keep whatever looks great and not worry when other plants don't. 5. Gifts. I've found that most of my plants are more then happy being transplanted, provided I dig a decent sized hole and then give them 3-6 months to establish. With the plants I've already moved to the rock garden at the botanical garden, we've literally had a 100% success rate of transplant - and that's over some 100-150 plants. Plenty of conifer lovers, friends, family, neighbors, etc. that would be happy to take my 'removed leftovers' and plop them into their yard. My current total is somewhere between 1150 and 1250 different conifers - a total of about 1600-2000 once you account for duplicates. Eventually in 15-20 years, I expect I'll have 400-600 on my property and the rest will have been moved, died, given away, sold, traded, etc. If you want to worry about me, picture me trying to water these gazillion plants as a full-time firefighter!! Now that's the hard part! And don't be sorry for your opinion. It's allowed(and has been repeated here), and I'm taking it all into consideration, even if you do have monkeybrains! -Will

I live near Seattle, Washington, Westy. It's a very forgiving climate for plants. Generally we see temps between 35 and 80 all year. Temps above 90 or below 25 or so are quite rare and occur only a few times a year. It does 'rain' a lot, but mostly it's the cloudy days that bum people out. Technically, on an annual basis, we receive less rain then Chicago, only ours is pretty much contained to 6-7 months(October, November, December, January, February and March). From June through September here it can be fantastically dry, basically a desert, so watering is a regular routine. That said, I wouldn't trade our Summers here for anywhere else. It's dry, warm and very comfortable for 4-5 months of the year. Best of luck in your dreams and house hunting. -Will