Have you seen "The Color Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses" by Rick Darke? It has a lot of nice photos and lots of info about ornamental grasses. There are lots of different miscanthus varieties, Darke says Gracillimus is one of the older ones and though beautiful, tends to flop. If you don't want to mix in shrubs with your grass hedge, you could mix Gracillimus (or another type of miscanthus) with different kinds of ornamental grasses, like feather reed grass (calamagrostis) or switch grass (panicum) for contrast in form and different flowering times. I've also found these two kinds of grasses easier to divide than miscanthus. Do you know what kind of butterfly bushes you have? In my zone, most butterfly bushes get taller than Gracillimus. Some plants I like in front of ornamental grasses are any daisy type flower [like purple coneflowers (echinacea), black eyed susans (rudbeckia), coreopsis, asters], catmints (nepeta)and calamints, Russian sage (perovskia), liatris, sedums, gaura, salvias and veronicas, daylilies and small spireas. These flowers are easy to care for and a lot of them attract butterflies too. Juliet

Echo - if I was a smart-alack I'd say invite me over to plant tomatoes in your driveway - that way we'd guarantee nothing will grow there - I can't get them to grow anywhere. If you are really against RoundUp a mixture of vinegar and salt will kill the weeds. Just be careful, if it leaches into your yard it will kill everything there also. I tried it once and then went back to RoundUp. http://www.garden-counselor-lawn-care.com/vinegar-weed-killer.html

Ah, ZKathy, I am so sorry for the pain caused by that storm. We lost our house (moved in 2 months before) on the river, a lot of the plants there died, did not seem to like that salt water. Our water did not stand long, just went back out, fortunately, but family members in the NOLA area suffered a long time too. Hope you enjoy gardening where you are now. Every spot seems to have its own brand of disaster waiting to happen. Familiar devils are easier to deal with, in my experience.

We had a clam shell driveway when we bought our house last year, and while it looked pretty, the shells were everywhere. They stuck to our shoes, they were in the house, in our cars, and my DH took them to work on his shoes and left them in the parking lot there. When we built our new garage we replaced the shells with gravel. A problem for plowing, but I love the crunching sound it makes when i walk on it and i can drive over it in all but the most severe snow events. Weeds can be a problem and i do have to rake some stones out of the grass in the spring. I like that it’s permeable for water drainage. in a couple of years i may decide to change to a blacktop driveway for plowing and keeping it clean, but right now the gravel works for us.