Asian jasmine sure is popular here for a groundcover. I used to wonder if it would be bad like wisteria, but many people say it doesn't climb. It's growing in front of our post office here in Atmore, and I have never seen it trying to climb the Japanese maple in the middle of it.

GeeDavey~ yes, the fines seem to decay a bit quicker than regular hardwood mulch, and that's ok by me. The only drawback is that I have to apply more bags of the fines to get the same coverage that I did with heavier hardwood mulch - you'd need, at the very least, 3 inches of fines or it'll wash away in the first heavy rain you have. One bag of fines doesn't give you much coverage when you're piling it on to a depth of 3 inches. However, the fines cost me nearly 2 dollars less per bag than the heavier mulch. So it kinda evens out. The product I buy is sold at a local nursery and is simply called 'soil conditioner', with the main ingredient listed as composted pine bark fines. Besides its use as a mulch or top dressing, you can mix it into the soil when you're digging new planting holes, which is something that isn't possible with traditional hardwood mulch. Another bonus is its natural dark color, which blends in nicely, and it smells really good, too. So far I'm happy with it.

How much mulch is too much? Are the shrubs and trees, such as they are, thriving? Even bark mulch will breakdown into valuable components of the soil eventually, but the larger the chunks, the longer it will take. Depending on the type of groundcover you choose, I'd be inclined to scrape away a few inches of the mulch and add garden or potting soil and then plant. The soil will provide enough of a base for the new groundcovers to take hold so they can then spread. Spreading may not be as rapid through areas of heavy mulch unless you select larger growing, more woody types like cotoneaster or kinnikinnick, whose spread is more determined by branch development rather than rooting at internodes.

Thanks so much for the suggestions. I added some leaf mulch today just to see how it would look and it actually looks really great. I guess in my effort to mulch, I just mimicked how nature would fill in the bare ground of a real woodland! No wonder the leaf mulch seems to look "right." I'm sure the plants will like it too. It's interesting that you mentioned the Dicentra eximia/Fringed Bleeding heart because I was looking at the Bleeding Heart today and thought its leaves looked unusual. The nursery tag says Dicentra spectabilis but the leaves look more like a Dicentra eximia. It's possible the nursery put a spectabilis tag on an eximia I suppose. I didn't know that Dicentra eximia doesn't go dormant in the summer -- thanks for the info! We have a pink Dicentra spectabilis that goes dormant in the summer but the "Alba" is new, so we haven't seen it through a summer yet. Maybe we're in luck and the new "Alba" spectabilis is actually an eximia. I was planning on planting some ferns around it so that when it goes dormant the ferns will cover the fading foliage, but maybe now I won't need to. Wow, Cardinal plant--it must be beautiful. We have violets popping up all over now too (in our lawn), so I'm transplanting some of them to the mini "woodland". Thanks again for everyone's help!