My initial response is to suggest you contact your local extension office to tap into those resources for gardening in your zone/location. Next would be to visit local botanical gardens to see what does well in similar conditions to what you have to offer the plants & how well your soil/growing conditions meet their needs. After that, check out some gardening books from the library and do your homework--I did tons of research before I ever stuck a spade in the dirt to design my beds and I was a fairly experienced gardener when I started out. Don't lose track of the wealth of information that's available to you thanks to the Internet. Here at GardenWeb are many voices of experience that, if you heed them, will help you avoid lots of common mistakes the rest of us have made (sometimes repeatedly) over the years. Read old threads and learn from our mistakes. I hit the jackpot when I moved here--my folks practiced organic gardening for 50 years before I came so I'm blessed with amazing soil conditions + lots of healthy, plump worms. First lesson I learned was to avoid chemicals--they're marked 'poison' for a reason. Poison the weeds & you poison the bugs & you're poisoning the earth. For every garden situation, there is generally a non-toxic, earth-friendly alternative. For example, I pour vinegar on weeds & poison ivy rather than spraying them with weed killer. Check out a book called 'Trowel & Error' by Sharon Lovejoy--you won't regret reading it. Watering may or may not be an issue given your soil type and zone but again, it doesn't hurt to ask questions of the neighbors or local garden experts. There's generally a garden article in our weekly local paper so it's often a good thing to read those. One tip I can offer is that when you do water, it's best to water at the base of a plant but only when it needs it. A recycled plastic milk jug set close to a plant & with a pinhole an inch from the bottom will slowly let out a stream of water so the plant gets watered at the base. Generally speaking, watering the entire plant during the growing season isn't recommended. IMO grass is the worst invasive plant on the planet. If you just grind it up when starting a new bed, you may never live long enough to eradicate it. I dug up the turf in sections and removed it before planting a new bed. Looking back, it was one of the smartest things I ever did even when I didn't know what I was doing. Did you buy the butterfly bushes or grow them from seed? Did you tease out the roots before setting them in the ground? The roots of nursery-grown plants tend to start growing around and around inside their pots because there's insufficient depth/room for them in the pot. If you don't tease them loose before planting, they'll continue to grow in a circle which ultimately means the plant dies. Ask me how I learned this. While I don't amend my soil (thanks Mom & Dad), many on the forum will recommend you add compost to the soil. Your planting window may or may not be closed at this point but that's a zone-specific question which I'll leave to those more familiar with your growing conditions. I can pretty much plant right through the season except for the extreme heat/dryness of mid-summer where I am but generally consider each plant's unique requirements before doing so. Like you, I have zero interest in annuals other than pansies--got to have pansies as soon as they're available from the nurseries. My focus the past 7+ years has been perennials that perform consistently in the garden with little to no help from me and which attract bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. Keep in mind Mother Nature has kept the planet green for a few million years without our help so take whatever tips you can from what she's accomplished & do your part to keep it going. One last note--check out the Winter Sowing forum. You can grow lots of perennials from seed for virtually zero cost and quickly fill your garden with healthy plants in a short space of time that way. My own garden beds are now filled with perennials I grew from seed via WS. As a result I've achieved my garden goals far more speedily than I ever would have anticipated.

With big new gardens, you'll be getting your baptism by fire so I definitely wouldn't make more work for myself by lifting the wood chip mulch. Also, since the perennials died back in the fall and returned in the spring, the previous gardener obviously put in plants that do well in your climate and garden's environment so hardiness doesn't seem to be an issue. For us in colder climates, snow cover is the best insolation - it protects from heaving, wind dessication, sun scald. You could definitely smother things by over protecting- compost, mulch, grass clippings, leaves plus wet burlap. Seems that'd be a sure recipe for rot. I've relied on winter snow cover since I don't mulch - nothing against mulch but just haven't wanted to go that route. I may change my mind if our rain deficient conditions go into a third year and beyond. Since I was in your situation inheriting large family gardens (all of which needed restoration, rejuvination and reorganization), mixed shrub borders, and big expanses of lawn in 2002, I can reiterate what's been said above and maybe offer a tip or two: You can't get it all done at once. I spent the first growing season keeping a garden calendar/diary noting when things emerged, bloom time, color, size of plant, did it need dividing, thinning, transplanting elsewhere, or discarding altogether. I used that first season to prune back overgrown shrubs, plant Viburnum in some gaps, dig out some ratty Barberry that wasn't worth keeping, discard old hybrid tea roses that managed to throw out 1 black spotted leaf apiece. And, although composting was always done on a small scale, I turned it into a much bigger operation. So make sure you start or continue a compost pile. Sometimes you just can't save everything. Weeding and clearing out grasses from around dense clumps of things was too hard. I let things bloom out and just lifted them all, cleaned them out, divided, and with whatever part of the bed was temporarily empty, I dug and screened out the grasses, weeds and lily sprouts, did some soil amending and reset the plant divisions. Anything I couldn't relocate, I potted up and put on the curb with a "Free" sign. Gone almost instantly and saved from being composted. There is an optimal time for dividing plants, but I have the tendency to do it any time regardless. No losses so far. A little breathing room to get in and among plants. At first I liked the smothering of space effect, but once getting into serious weeding, space between things got to make more sense - and I wasn't stepping on things in the process. Take advantage of naturally occuring plants. My first sign of spring is a sea of Scilla, and as those are fading and starting to disappear altogether the wild forget-me-nots start. The forget-me-nots are such dense mounds they choke out other weeds and are easy to pull out if inconvenient. When the ferns start to unfurl I get wild columbine and Johnny Jump-Ups. The joy of annuals. Although primarily a perennial gardener, annuals are supurb bloom gap fillers. Inexpensive, readily available, some folks even have great luck starting them from seed (I don't) and non stop until the first killing frost. Gardening should be enjoyable and a rewarding pasttime. If something doesn't appeal to you or doesn't perform like you expect, replace it. I've added plants my Father wouldn't have considered on a bet - different sedums, daylilies other than the old Hyperion and Tetrina's Daughter, Oriental poppies, Black Eyed Susans, bleeding hearts, hostas, salvias... Much more than you wanted to read, no doubt. But I know what it's like to be faced with sorting out a garden you didn't initially plant. If you run into things you can't identify and have a digital camera, posters on the "Name that Plant" Forum are incredibly quick with identifications.

You are correct the seed is the tiny black ball that comes after the flowers bloom. In zone 5 I do not have seeds yet as my canna's just began blooming. Seeds take a very long time to grow at least my experience is that. I have volunteer cannas's that appear in my yard from the previous year after cutting the foliage down and digging up for winter. To accelerate the process you should nick the seed to allow it to start to grow faster.

While you can use a dresser as a vanity, it's better left to a lightly used powder room than a kids bath heavy with steam and slopovers from a sink. Solid wood actually expands and contracts more in the presence of moisture than either plywood or furniture board. That expansion and contraction will create cracks in the finish if the boards used are not finished on all 6 sides, which most are not. That seasonal expansion is one of the reason that even fine furniture pieces are usually not constructed of solid wood. The sides and backs are usually veneered plywood or furniture board. Neither is an inferior material when the proper construction techniques for that type of material are used. And what makes a cabinet or furniture piece "resistant" to leaks has more to do with the protective coating on top of the substrate than the actual substrate itself. A lot of the older furniture out there has a shellac finish, which is completely unsuited to a damp environment. That is not to say that you can't find a great dresser or buffet and refinish it with modern finishes (inside and out) and successfully use it in a light use environment. That IS a completely doable project. It's just more work and expense than perhaps you are envisioning and less successful in a full bath than a powder room.