It's fall planting season. Every year we go out, dig big holes, amend the clay with old hay, and install dozens--hundreds--of subshrubs, shrubs, seedling trees, and herbaceous perennials. The weather has been friendly this year, often gray, rarely wet, not yet cold. A good rain to water everything would be nice, but it's comfortable for work.

The garden is too big for us to do it all at once. This year one of the areas we're concentrating on is a place we call the boundary bed, since it was once the boundary of the garden, since extended further. It was originally planted back in 2006 and housed a grab bag of rooted roses: Hybrid Musks, some once-blooming old roses, and some purchased David Austin varieties; the roses were in a double line, and outside of them were dotted subshrubs, mainly lavender, and irises. There were clematis and more irises, and I wanted some shrubs down the middle, too. There were problems with all this. The ground was poor, and we amended it inadequately. The bed was too narrow: exposed as it was to full sun and full wind, it didn't have the bulk of plant matter it needed for the plants to thrive. As a result, the DA roses mostly died. The Hybrid Musks suffered from my inadequate pruning. The clematis languished. The bed often looked quite handsome in May, but regularly by August I looked at it and thought, "It's dead. It can never recover from this." Still, by the following spring it had come back to life, in its messy way.

This year some subterranean part of my brain looked at the bed and thought it was time to make a push. I have worked on the bed off and on in its nine years of life. Two or three years ago I planted some rosemary in front of 'Archduke Joseph' to protect its knees plus a Buddleia 'Black Knight'; and last year we dug huge holes and planted 'Persian Yellow', 'Austrian Copper' (both suckers) and the invincible 'Pink Leda'. I wanted tough roses. What with all the years of planting and mulching, the soil has improved a bit, and some of the roses are looking like they could make decent shrubs if they had a good winter pruning. So this year we went to work on this bed. On a trip to the local nursery we carried off all the lavender and rosemary they had, eleven and five plants respectively, and have planted most of them as edging plants in this bed, along with a young rooted shrub germander and a large transplanted silver mound (I think it's called) artemisia. I put another buddleia in the middle, and, after shifting some irises, improving the soil as I did, planted the China 'Louis Philippe' and added a young tree peony. I still won't have enough rosemary and lavender to finish the edging, but much of it will be done.

What with the all the digging and amending, the edging subshrubs, and the shrubs and roses we're planting, I think the bed has a good chance of becoming a worthy part of the garden. It will also be able to fulfill its role as a boundary, as it encloses a section of garden, though not the whole garden as it once did.

Here are the plants currently growing in the boundary bed (from memory):

roses: 'Quatre Saisons', 'Juno', 'Archduke Joseph', 'Penelope (2)', 'Thisbe', 'James Mitchell', 'Vanity', 'Moonlight', 'Cornelia', 'Mme. Boll', 'Austrian Copper', 'Pink Leda', a DA rose whose name I forget, 'Louis Philippe' (China), 'Duchesse de Montebello' (I think), 'Complicata', 'Maiden's Blush', 'Celestial' (very unhappy), 'Sharifa Asma', 'Louise Odier', and a 'Rosa Mundi' that's reverting back to 'Officinalis';

edging subshrubs: hybrid lavender, rosemary, big clumps of Iris pallida, species caryopteris, one shrub germander and one silver mound artemisia, all more or less silvery plants;

other shrubs and plants inside the bed: two tree peonies, one 'High Noon' (this is a great plant), one a light red without a name, planted by mistake for a pink one; two buddleias, 'Black Knight' and one I think is magenta; miscellaneous bearded irises; two clematis, one barely hanging on, another light blue--'Mrs. Chomondely'?--sprawling along the ground and in extremely lovely bloom right now; odd plants of nepeta and hyssop, pink flowered achillea (I think) and a taller yellow-flowered herbaceous perennial, possibly also an achillea.

The color scheme, insofar as there is one, is supposed to be predominantly pink-blue-lavender-soft yellow-white. Heaven knows what color the tree peony will turn out to be, but there won't be much else in flower when it blooms in any case. I would like to stick another Tea rose in somewhere, to balance out 'Archduke Joseph' but am not sure there's room. We'll need more edging plants. I want to put in another buddleia 'Black Knight' to keep the Archduke company: it could use some protection. A Salvia guaranitica would do well: my big one by the house has layered. And if the boundary bed settles in nicely after this current round of work, I'll be able to think about filling it in with herbaceous perennials and possible a few bulbs.

Melissa