Lots of repetition and abundance in my garden... As others have mentioned, seeds are a key cheap and easy way to fill in blanks while waiting for things to grow into their space, or fill space while deciding on a more permant plant, or fill a hole left by something that died unexpectedly. The 'hole' that is being filled could a perennial-sized one or a tree or shrub-sized one. Seeds are one of a range of things I use. Specifically, I use: - direct seeding/self-seeding annuals, bienials and perennials (e.g. Jacob's ladder, feverfew, blue flax, columbine, hollyhocks, forget-me-nots, corydalis,...) - easily grown seed grown annuals and perennials that get transplanted into place in the garden in spring (e.g. delphiniums, heliotrope, Angel roses,...) - rooted cuttings from easily rooted plants (e.g. Persicaria polymorpha...) - divisions from easily divided plants (e.g. hosta, lamium,...) Once you have a few of these plants in your garden, you can easily have abundance coming out your ears! (Fewerfew also makes good mulch/green manure if you cut down the early growth and leave it lie on the ground in the bed...) And no blank spaces if something dies. They are easily removed when you want to replace them with something more substantial. They can help unify things because it's easy to repeat them in various places. Things like columbine and Persicaria polymorpha do well for me in both sun and varying degrees of shade so link/unify the sunny garden areas to the shady ones. Like bogart, I see the garden as an evolving thing and expect and desire it to change over time. The loss of any one thing might be temporarily disappointing but is all part of the process. It probably helps that we have been gardening here for 8 years and intend to stay here for the forseeable future so view things on a longer time persepective. I think implicit - and sometimes explicit - in many of the questions posted here is a short term time horizon for the garden. That's understandable given how mobile people are these days but a long view is the most relaxing way to garden!

Design - an idea that one has in their mind and possibly puts such idea on a media. Garden - a place where plant material grows as allowed or directed. A vegetable garden starts w/ a design. A landscape starts with a design. A house, a building, an automobile, a computer, an artistic creation starts w/ an idea or design of some kind. Regardless what the finished product is, it all started w/ an idea or design from somewhere. Only Nature creates a garden or landscape W/O a drawn or drafted design. Your garden, even after several years of being in place is still part of the original idea or design. Design - Garden ??? Is there a defined separation ?? Absolutely. At what point in the process can one say "  here is the true separation of design and garden". I can only say that such a defining point or moment will be defined after several growing seasons. Even after several growing seasons it will be a judgment call. Was it really defined last year or is there something that hasn't quite reached the point of suspected potential or the desired appearance in the original "design" ??? Design  Garden !!? We create a design and then we create a garden. With or without a documented plan we designed a garden from our ideas and ideals of what a garden is and should look like. Your garden may never be the same as mine but your garden is your design and not mine. A garden is a process started form some sort of a design. Semantics. He said Â. She said. Design Â. Garden. ItÂs the finished product that we marvel at and not so much how it got there. Gardens are living, breathing objects. Designs are fixed in our heads or on paper. A design can change with an eraser while a garden can change as we remove and replace what we failed to see in our designs eye. Still, a design can be a garden and a garden is a living design. Jake

Replacing the tree in the front yard is on the next-year list. Your guess of Sorbus acucuparia was spot on; that's what this one is. It began as a multistem tree and is losing one trunk per year. I think voles may be eating the bark just below the soil surface. Now it has only one trunk that is leaning at an odd angle. So that will be replaced for certain, and perhaps the bed that contains it will be moved or reconsidered. No other trees are on the table for now. We have glorious mountain views and we have been very careful to frame them deliberately. In this case I'm much more concerned with the view from the house than the view of the house. The tree on the right in Yardvaark's photo would block a spectacular view. Of course, you had no way of knowing that. :) But rest assured, the front yard has generous clumps of aspen trees that do soften the overall look of the front yard. Also Yardvaark, it's pretty easy to reconcile liking the idea of a tree yet not actually wanting one. In the abstract, small trees look nice anchoring house corners. Yet in specific, in this particular case with the long and lean layout of the front porch, I prefer that to be left open. Make sense? That said, if I could find the perfect, small, well-behaved, interesting tree to put in the left corner of the foundation, I would consider it. I've always wondered about Hawthorne trees because they stay narrow. Deviant, I just love the look of that entryway patio and porch. That creates a very welcoming face on the house and is probably a lovely place to linger and socialize with the UPS guy. Thanks for sharing the photo. Thanks for the ideas and input, I am benefiting from the collective wisdom here. I am home from my trip now and will have a look at my space with fresh eyes.

Yes I have been short of time lately, but after I just saw your latest questions, I took only a moment to walk over to my row of trees and check thier measurements. The fence behind my trees appears 10 times worse that the one in your photo. My trees are planted on about 9 foot centers and I only did one row of them. The bottom four feet height on then averages spreads across their widths of at average is 5 feet all the way around them. For the distance from the two intercecting fences inside corner to the end of the bad fence my trees are distacting the view from is about 50 feet long. I have 7 GGs planted along this length. the GG's trunk nearest to the inside corner of the intercecting fences has a trunk only 4 feet away from the corner. the 6 other GGS have an 8 feet distance I can measure from trunk to trunk, But the planting holes when first dug were centered at almost 9 feet distances. The lower 4 feet of the trees are the most full and there is still an average of a 2 foot gap between each of the trees that needs to fill in before the trees will make a solid screen along that height of the 6 foot tall fence. Since I stoped giving my trees osmokote even before last year the rest of the trees growth is not as thick or wide, so there is even more view of the top two feet of the ugly fence. This is the reason why I suggested it is best for you to plant two staggered rows. That way you will have a better full screen more quickly than my trees. the neighbor's two story house is no more than 4 feet on the otherside of the ugly fence. The tops of my trees have grown about a foot higher than the bottom of their second story windows. I measured a 4 foot distance from the fence slats to the trunks of my trees, and I could still easily, with out much tree branch displacement, walk behind my trees and the fence when I came up with the 50 foot measurement for the lengh of fence that the lower 4 feet of this line of trees currently cover. One other note is that I planted only 18 inch tall trees to start. They are fairly well protected from the prevailing north/south winds because the 2 story house is directly south of them and there is a large scarlet oak tree directly north of the first 3 from that inside corner I discussed above. I live on a corner lot and my house faces west, but the fence in question is along along the east facing back yard/south side yard, and it stretchs westward to about half the depth of our south facing side yard. So my GGs get plenty of afternoon sun, especially in the summer and before they grew so tall got a lot of morning shade. I only went to all this description to illustrate how protected they are from drying winds. This is so effective for then that my trees have never taken on a bronzy cast that many people report their GGS do in the winter. My trees are also planted on a slight rise where the builders of the two story house so close south of my trees never did a good job cleaning out the builders sand they uses when installing a narrow sidewalk between that house and the privacy fence. The growth I reported with my trees has all been affected by theses issues I have just discussed. GGs which struggle will slow draining soil that stays wet longer will grow only half as fast as mine have until they get well established, which could take up to 4 years. Some of them might even die during sudden dry periods and have to be replaced. Also trees planted at 6 feet tall might take a full 2 years before you see much top growth out out them. That is because they will be using this time to develop a better root system which can support the 5 foot yearly growth these trees do while they are young and once they are established. The trade off you get with this is while they are waiting to develop a larger root system and not growing much in height, they will be doing a better job than mine did concerning the thickening of their trunks and also thickening the density and spread of their branches. My trees did not have to that root size catch up so they started showing nice top growth in the first year they were planted. It took them all this time though to develop an exceptionally good density and branch spread over the lower 4 feet of them. If I had kept spreading Osmokote under them and watering them regularly in dry periods after they got well established, them that exceptionally nice thickness and spread portion of them today might have reached at least 8 feet high. As it is they have a fairly nice appearance from top to bottom, but do not have the type of screening affect that you would want to handle well the issues you have described in your back yard view. Hope that with all this description, it will help you to understand better why I suggested a double staggered row with the front row beeing the Steeplechase trees. If cost is an issue, you might plant 6 foot tall GGS on the back row and either purchase locally or order in if they cannot be found locally the steeplechase sport cultivars of the GGS. If ordered in those Steeplechase cultivar trees would probably on be available no larger than 3 gallon size and will look fairly thin when you get them, but if you provide them good drainage, water them correctly, and feed them with osmokote each spring and fall growing season then it will suprise you a how quickly they catch up in size the the larger GGS you planted in the back row.