Good idea! I know they can kill trees if you smother the roots. And so can hacking through the roots to put in a bed! I'm hoping I can get the right depth so I do no root-hacking AND no smothering. Fortunately, my fondness for shrubs means that once I have everything planted, I won't be doing huge amounts of messing about in the bed and can leave the tree roots alone as they come through again. We're going to add on to the front of the house--the left bay will come out about 30' more than it is now. I'm going to use that to take a wall straight across from there and up from the corner of the (currently) red section to create a courtyard. It won't have a gate--the doorway will be open to the yard. Inside, I want a courtyard garden. A bluestone-set-in-gravel path will stretch from the driveway across the yard portion and to the courtyard. (Taking it from the street would look silly in this case.) There will be an open yard section there as large as most front yards. *g* Preferably, I'd love to do a no-mow yard in which I can plant some species tulips, crocuses, grape hyacinths, lilies of the valley, and the like in semi-artificial patterns among the grasses...not sure exactly how yet...could be kind of cool. That part of the yard would be ringed by a mixed shrub border to screen it from the neighbors and the front part of the yard, closer to the street, which will start at the first trees on either side. The front section will be pure entertainment rooms, divided by walls of beds. I'm going to have a full-fledged outdoor kitchen, with 3-5 other very spacious rooms flowing one to the next. The sorts of spaces are normally put in backyards, but with the kind of lot we have, they'll actually work better for entertainment in the front, and it'll look good there, too. I want a firepit and some sort of pond/fountain--I'm actually thinking of an above-ground, square and blatantly artificial pond that overflows into a rigidly geometric channel/brook. I am REALLY agaonizing over balancing the Asian and the modern-formal influences. Asian gardens are typically an abstraction or refinement of nature, and formal gardens are as artificial as you can get. If I get the balance wrong, it'll just look WEIRD. If I get it right, it will be fantastic. One thing that I'm thinking hard about is bed-shapes. Should I go flow-y or geometric? I could go geometric and have sort of a cascade of rectangles, which would be build of cinderblock and could either be plastered over or (another decision!) faced with bluestone. The bluestone would be more subtle, and I'm thinking it would soften the modernism while keeping to the clean lines, and it would look better with less rigid plantings inside... If I were in the UK, I'd have no problem finding a designer who often dows things of that sort. Similar styles are VERY popular there. Here, though, I haven't found anyone locally who has that kind of aesthetic or has demonstrated the ability to think along those lines. The house was designed by a European, so I shouldn't be surprised that I'm being attracted to modern European garden design to harmonize with it! Weirdly enough, it would be easier to merge cottage and modern formal than Asian and modern formal! *g* I have an acre of woodlands that will eventually become a more "pure" Japanese garden, though. I need to pull the plat. We're taking possession in the fall, so I'll have all winter to prepare the beds before planting in the spring!

Flora, That looks great! I have behind my barn, 6000+ bricks. I was thinking of laying a border of them side by side (vs. end to end) for the lawn mower. However, one of the things that has prevented me from edging anything with anything but Round-Up, is that I have 3 acres of beds. As it is, right now the only chemical I use at all is Round-Up. I fight poison ivy, so I always have it. I simply sprayed the edges of my beds so I could mow on the dead edge. The mulch is mounded up abruptly, so there is a defined edge of the garden. The Round-Up creates kind of a no-man's land. Unfortunately, although it does a good job of keeping the weeds and grass from growing into the beds, it's not the prettiest at all. I love the idea of the edging + the bricks/stones. I might become a little OCD about this and try one of my smaller beds. That'll only be maybe 150' x 15 to 30' wide! Oh - and for anyone who is looking for bricks? Don't forget Freecycle. People have all this stuff stacked up behind their houses.... Christine

dlm, that is a beautiful bed. I like the linens and the way your bed frame eliminates the need for a bedskirt. Re the first pix - I have that bedskirt and hate it. JCPenny - it is very thin and wrinkles easily, I am thinking of cutting up my old white (quilted) bedspread and sewing it onto the edge of the bedskirt, on the outside to completely change the look. That way, it will have some heft and go better with my new quilted bedspread. My bedspread and shams are white, but the linens are hot pink. I agree with the poster who guessed the item at the end of the bed is a whole piece quilt. It doesn't lay as flat as an empty duvet would. I used to have one of these from my grandmother. It was a blue print with a bit of pink and yellow. Old timey!

Bon, I'm glad you're not going to try to improve too large of an area too quickly. It is exhausting to do so much at once. I find I'm happier when I work on smaller areas within the larger area. With my very first hugelkultur in Texas, we had cut down a dead oak tree and maybe a dead hackberry as well. (It was long, long ago.) Tim cut the limbs into 2' lengths and I stood them up vertically in a row like a rough picket fence, sinking their ends about 4" into the soil. Those limbs roughly outlined the shape of the hugelkultur bed. Then I filled it in with lots more limbs lying horizontally, and I piled compost type material on top of them, including tons of autumn leaves and compost from a big compost pile I had in the back corner of the yard. We added soil on top. I no longer remember where that soil came from, so maybe we bought a load of dirt and had it delivered. Everything grew so well in that area that I then added smaller pieces of rotting and decaying tree limbs and branches to existing shrub beds and flower beds. It was the easiest soil improvement I've ever done. Were it not for the plentiful population of venomous snakes here, I'd do nothing but hugelkultur beds. I'm just afraid that every bed I built with hugelkultur would be a haven for snakes....mostly because, so far, every one I've ever built has, in fact, become a haven for snakes except for the last two that I built using regular lumber and hardware cloth. So, maybe the secret to success in my snakey area is that it has to be an enclosed bed filled with hugelkultur inside of it, but not a pile directly on the ground at or below grade level where the snakes can just slide right in. Snakes are so awful all the time here. If a thunderstorm brings down branches and limbs from the pecan trees (they shed wood all the time---I think if you look at a pecan tree in the wrong way and offend it, it will drop branches just because it is mad), if you rake them up, you need to pick them up right away. If you leave a little pile of raked-up limbs lying on the ground for a day, then when you go to pick it up, there will be a snake coiled up under there somewhere. If you pick up a concrete stepping stone or a big rock, there will be either a snake or scorpion underneath it. If you pick up a board or a piece of sheet metal, you'll find a snake. During snake season, there isn't anything I'll pick up off the ground without using a fence post or garden rake to lift it first, just to make sure there's not a snake lurking underneath it. The last time Tim picked up a concrete stepping stone off the ground (last spring) without using some sort of pole to lift it first, he found a coiled-up copperhead ready to strike. If we didn't have all these snakes here, life and gardening would be a lot easier.....except we'd be totally overrun by rodents. I could hugelkultur to my heart's content. Every year a friend of ours who is trying to make extra money for Christmas gifts asks Tim if he can come into our woodland and collect deadfall or cut down dead standing trees to sell as firewood. Every year the answer is no. (Don't get me started on how much more of a "No" and an explanation this guy would get if he were asking me if he could do this!) I'd never let a stick of wood leave this place when I know how much it improves the soil as it rots in place. Our woodland has the most wonderful rich, humusy soil imaginable. I am really careful not to take too much wood from any single area of the woodland because I don't want to strip any part of the woods of the raw materials that decompose and enrich it. I may be the only person in our neighborhood who is just completely 100% delighted to hear a tree crash down in the woods. As soon as I hear it hit the ground, I know I've got plans for that tree somewhere down the line. I've dragged tons of tree limbs and brush to fill in eroded gullies over the years. I did that for ages and ages before I ever used any of the wood for our garden. When you fill in eroded areas, you pretty much stop the erosion. Then, as the brush and limbs decompose, the soil becomes worthy of growing something. I just keep piling on brush and wood until the eroded gullies aren't gullies any more. At the point that the gullies are level with the ground on either side of the former gully and native plants are sprouting, then I start dragging everything to the next closest gully. I think it is exciting when I see native grasses and trees sprouting in an area that used to be bare, eroded land that eroded even more every time it rained. I'm glad I have a plentiful supply of trees that eventually drop limbs or die so that we can replenish the soil here, but if we didn't have them, I'd just use cornstalks, prairie grasses and anything else I could get my hands on .