Growth behavior of shrubs is not that fixed anyway. You can't read a representative spread for the species somewhere and then know that your planting will become exactly the same size. If you want them to touch, plant the same distance apart as you you think they will grow tall. Keep in mind that shrubs do not grow to a certain height and then come to a complete halt, while remaining vigorous and attractive.

Mmm, autumn always seems like the start of the gardeners year - new bulbs, lots of pruning, cuttings for overwintering, harvest, ladling on compost and planting the new bare root fruits, roses and shrubs. After a truly bizarre rainless summer, the allotment has turned sere and brown much earlier than usual. Rudbeckias, dahlias and heleniums and asters had an attenuated show - I always struggle with these prairie type beauties on my sandy soil but one must have them. This year, not even emergency hosing was going to prolong the luminous late summer show of golds, bronzes and purples so I turned my face to the gravel garden which never fails to thrive. Melissa, how I love spanish broom - yep, Spartium junceum can be a thug but what a gorgeous fragrant and elegant one. They twist and bend, making fantastically gnarly shapes and grow huge and fat in East Anglia. Cytisus also grows to shocking tree size, as does Tamarix. Desperate savage pruning has been done. even though the shrubs in question are less than 6 years old, they are eating the shed. A glorious stipa gigantea, planted so carefully to filter the low evening sun, has been overshadowed one one side and totally mugged by a giant acanthus on the other. In truth, the entire gravel garden has to be redone, lifting the remnants of the old membrane (which utterly failed to prevent the millions of verbena, centranthus, ox-eye daisies, althea and eryngiums from seeding with total abandon) and replacing plants which should never have been placed there (legion - Dieramas, Schizostylus, echinaceas - embarrassing how clueless I was to plant these moisture lovers in gravel!!!)Then there are the plants which clearly love it but are far too keen - helianthemums, nepetas, salvias, hebes - small cushions are ground swallowing mounds. Apart from lots of lavender - I have hedges of L Hidcote - the deepest blue, I do not have as many silver plants as I would like. A colony of pulsatilla does well with summer silky seedheads. Santolina and a lone artemisia (Powis Castle - another huge thing). Would like to try astelia and also celmisias. A plant grown much by Ingrid, and a revelation to me, was Limonium - violetta, I have and it looks terrific with eryngiums and stipa tenuissima. Stachys or Phlomis have, so far, failed to touch my heart and I have done verbascums to death. Still throwing out flowers is the modest Zauschneria, looking good with the last of the escholzias, Salvia greggii and microphylla are flowering profusely and unstoppable. Also, pushing out another cycle of flowers - a lovelu silver leafed mound of erodium chrysantha (might be good for you, Melissa, it is a lovely thing). However, much of this is happening out of my sight since I am woefully stuck at home in a kitchen which resembles Entebbe. A simple flooring job turned into armageddon - the massively heavy cast-iron and enamel sink is upside down on the sofa, the old washing machine has been drug to the tip and a new (to me) one has arrived - although the sink issue means it is still in the middle of the kitchen. Am running out of knickers and socks - may have to be a slut and turn them inside out since the whole water system is now only usable with a lot of fiddling about with stopcocks. In a moment of frenzy, I thought we may as well go the whole way and ripped off great swathes of old painted wallpaper - which of course, came off really easily....on one wall - the rest seems as though it was cemented in position. The ingrates (offspring) have absented themselves for large amounts of time yet still manage to materialise at sensitive (shouty, sweary) moments and chip in with ludicrous suggestions (we could put speakers in the new sink cupboards, why don't we have an indoor hammock?)Estimates of finishing time have gone from 'around a week' to 'in time for Christmas'. We are eating a lot of 'bread based snacks' - although the rate of jam consumption is worrying as I was definately slack this year, using the virusey raspberries as an excuse to cut down on all the 'earth mother' nonsense I had somehow got myself into(what was I thinking?) May be forced onto chocolate spread - sweetheart can have marmalade (shudder). Even so, it has been a spectacular tomato year (no rain - no blight)- have had kilos and kilos from 40 plants. I now have wrists of iron from poking hundreds of tomatoes through a sieve. The first bareroots will be arriving soon so I will have every reason to flee the kitchen chaos.

I don't think there is anything wrong with using a few cultivars or non-native plants, as long as you choose plants that won't spread to the wild. To be safe I'd use only those non-natives that have been in cultivation on this continent a long time. For example, lilacs don't spread to the wild as far as I know, and they've had a hundred years or more to try. On the other hand, new introductions like Russian Sage - Perovskia spp. - are new to this continent and I think will be recognized as invasive of natural areas within a few years. It's your yard, and you should plant what you like as long as it won't negatively impact the wild areas near you (that is, as long as it is not invasive.) Nevertheless, I think you may find, like many of us have, that as you get more into native gardening you prefer natives and sometimes wish you hadn't planted non-natives, especially those that live a long time and take up space where you could have one more nice native plant if the exotic one wasn't there. Garlic Mustard will sprout and set seed in shade, under shrubs, and even within blackberry thickets. To get rid of it you'll have to diligently stop it from flowering and seeding for a number of years in a row. After the first couple of years you'll see fewer and fewer new plants, but you'll have to be on guard for a long time. You can pull, spray, or smother the plants, but it will take some work. Raspberry, on the other hand, is native but grows a bit too rampantly to make it welcome in many yards. It will not grow well in the shade, so once you have trees and shrubs established you won't have nearly as much raspberry. Also, as others have said, establishing thick stands of other plants like native grasses and wildflowers will help slow down the raspberry and the Garlic Mustard. Raspberry grows from a system of underground roots or stems, and when you pull or cut a patch a lot of the underground material remains and will quickly resprout. After a few cuttings or, especially, pulling of canes, the underground part will diminish and you'll have a lot less resprouting.

Here's a quote from that site, lol: "The myth of Ceanothus being short lived is primarily spread by incompetent gardeners that insist on applying drip irrigation, summer water and soil amendments. Upland native plants hate all three. Expect a 25+ year life in most well tended (no overwatering, no soil disturbance, no fertilizing, no drip, no application of soil amendments) gardens." Although we will have drip, our landscape company is going to put in deep watering tubes (I don't know if there is an "official" name for those) for the trees. Sounds like it otherwise thrives on neglect...sounds like my kind of tree. LOL!!! Don't get me wrong, I know all these things we put in are going to require some care, but with the size of our lot, I need some things I don't have to do much to so I have time for the things that do require care. And so I can spend time in my veggie garden. So since the guy at the nursery pointed out that Saucer Magnolias aren't messy like the Southern ones, I've spent the morning looking for a good variety of it that stays smallish (not 20 feet wide...maybe 10) and truly isn't messy like the Southerns. Any suggestions? The nursery has Vulcan but I'm not sure that's the best choice. I just wonder if what he said about Saucer's not being messy is really true of all the Saucers...