The leaves on the smaller trees will fall into the beds they are in. The largish tree still with leaves is a red oak. About 25-30% of those leaves remain on the tree all winter and drop off in early spring - in March. All the fallen oak leaves end up collecting against the south fence over the winter and get raked into the beds at the end of March. Sometimes (rarely!) DH vacuums them up in spring with a mulching leaf blower before dumping them on the beds. Usually they just get dumped in whole - they take a bit longer to break down that way but the plants don't seem to mind :-). The backyard is the biggest part of the garden, but it's actually the easiest part to maintain.

The leaves here don't seem to blow out of the beds once they have been raked into the beds.. I think, because there is a lot of foliage still in the beds, the plants hold the leaves in place. We don't bother starting raking up leaves until all the ash leaves are down.

Goodness, that bugbane is delicious! How does it play with other plants/self seed/etc?

The bugbane is very well behaved. I've never seen seedlings from them and the clumps don't increase in size very much. I gather some people find it doesn't bloom before frost hits, but they always bloom here for us.

'woody', your backyard with its many established trees is an oasis at any time in the year.

Thanks rouge. We think so too! :- ) Back in 1999 when we were looking for a house/property, one of the things that made us purchase this one was the ash, white pines and the red oak trees - all trees that I could see creating a garden around.

As I recall this past season you had (much) more light into your normally very shady backyard (ash tree fell and had to be removed?).

If I am right did you see a difference in the health and growth of your perennials back there?

rouge - The ash tree is still there - although the canopy is a small bit thinner. (We've done the treatment for EAB twice now and the tree seems to be doing well.) Eventually age and/or EAB will catch up to it. That's one of the reasons we've been planting smaller trees in the north beds over the years. The red oak was a fairly young tree when we bought the house. It is now quite big. The trees we took down last fall were a dead pine near the NW corner and a dying pussy willow beside the shed. I wasn't sure how much additional light the garden would have once they were gone. It turned out that it didn't make much difference at all! We planted the replacement 'Wolf Eyes' dogwood beside the stump of the dead pine. There is more sun beside the shed with the willow gone but the oak canopy is reaching that area now so I haven't changed any of the plantings there. I had moved an 'Empress Wu' hosta beside the willow stump after we took the tree down last fall. The hosta seems to be thriving there even with the sun.

In my mind, Canada is either a complete white out...or just like your garden Woody - a totally iconic look. Lovely.

My (ahem) clean-up will be ongoing for weeks though - just the pruning (150 roses and fruit bushes) takes me right through until March and the chipper will be running non-stop (although I am skiving off on the sofa today - finishing grand-daughter's 'rainbow' cardigan). I bought some children's knitting needles too. Knitters - how old were you when you learned how? I made my first pair of mittens when I was 6/7ish.

LOL Camp.! The 'reference landscape' for the backyard garden here is my maternal grandfather's farm-reverting-back-to-bush where I grew up in New Brunswick on the east coast of Canada. There are large parts of Canada that don't look much like that!

Re knitting - I used to be a knitter but have had to give it up due to motor control issues. Like you, I learned to knit young - by watching Grandma knit socks.... One of the last things I knit was a sweater for DH inspired by a Kaffe Fassett pattern based on the tumbling blocks quilt design. The colors I used turned out to make it a perfect camouflage sweater for fall! A rainbow sweater sounds fun - picture please...?

eta - DH and sweater - picture is a few years old but the sweater is still worn (it was made in 1997.)

I love that little shed! (your DH isn't so rough on the eyes, either :0p)

aaarrrgh- intarsia!!! Genius, Woody and way beyond me - although I do a lot of colour work - Estonian and Latvian 2 colour stuff. Ever done entrelac? I rarely venture outside of st.st, seed stitch and ribbing - and never do stuff which is lacy or frilly. Will attempt a pic when done.

Mr Woodyoak is hot though.

mxk3 - the shed replaced the falling-down one that was here when we bought the house. We didn't want to affect the property survey so we built the new one on the same footprint as the old one. I would have liked to make It a bit bigger, but at least DH can stand upright in this one! Originally we painted it a blue-gray with white trim, but that made it stand out too much. So I decided to try to make it look like an evergreeen :-). I used light green on the trim/leading edges, medium green for the body, and darker green towards the centre - door, door trim, and window trim, trying to mimic the color variation on an evergreen affected by where light strikes it and where the paler new growth happens. I'd probably go one shade darker on the lightest color whoever it needs repainting, but we definitely are happy with how it tuned out.

LOL DH is a cutie - with a bit less hair now :-)

Camp. - nope, never did entrelac. I liked working with colors too. I used to make a lot of the Nordic ski sweaters with the Icelandic wool. I liked the minimal seams due to using round needles, and the heavy yarn knit up so fast! I could make one of those sweaters in just over a week, even when I was working. I was never a skier but the sweaters were nice warm barn sweaters for winter riding. I wasn't much into lacy or frilly either but did like patterns made from variation in the stitches - I'm not sure if there's a word for that; hopefully you know what I mean....

Yep, I think we are on the same (knitting) page. The cardigan I am doing now is top down raglan, no seam (just finished the body tonight). The impaired mobility is a toughie though. A friend of mine with arthritis is having a go at crochet - I drilled out a piece of dowel and glued a hook in the hole so it now has a nice fat handle she can grip. Maybe some such modification might help you...and have you seen those sock looms?

Camp. My motor issues are neurological on the left side; there isn't any handy-dandy tools to help. Actually, I still can do some knitting as long as it doesn't require too much dexterity (carrying colors is too tricky these days and cabling makes me cranky and frustrated!) I did recently manage to do an infant-sized hat for a friend's daughter's first baby. (Crochet never appealed to me - probably because my early attempts at it produced abysmal results!)

We seem to be wandering off garden topics a lot lately :-). The winter down time is obviously looming! I'm debating whether to sign up for another University of Guelph on-line garden course for the term starting in January to help keep winter boredom at bay. You're lucky to be live in a climate where it is possible to still do thing in the garden in winter.

What a generous description of the bugbane - thank you! Now I have to go back and see how sweaters worked into the topic...