What kind of garden do you prefer/have?

I am not sure to consider myself a novice gardener or intermediate. But I was thinking how I have to have at least one of everything and almost anything that will grow in my yard/zone. So it got me wondering about garden design.

You know how you see those gorgeous gardens in the catalogs with masses of color zones which they are trying to sell you? You know, the "Blue Garden" or the "Red Garden" with masses of purple salvias or brown eyed susans etc. My gardens don't look anything like that. Rather, I have a bunch of different plants that have the same class of colors, which I prefer jewel tones as opposed to pastels.

I also strive for continuous blooms from February-ish - through first frost. So I started to think, which do I prefer in terms of garden design? Do I like those catalog gardens better, or do I like my kitchen sink garden with the same color pallette? Maybe because I have only been into gardening for about the past 5 years, since I got married, I am still in that "I gotta have one of everything phase?"

I haven't made up my mind, but would like to hear what you all prefer?

"Gotta have one of everything"? LOL

I was that way too until I figured out what did and did not grow well here - even some "easy" stuff dies on me sometimes - so I tend to stick to multiple varieties of things that grow well - like different types of Yarrow, Sedum, Daylilies, Columbines, Iris, Salvias, Artemesia, etc.

I do get a lot of good ideas from garden mags, but try to adapt them to my particular needs.
I like the "rainbow" look - all different colors spread around with a small mass of a particular plant - but I don't put 2 blues together, or 2 pinks together KWIM? I pay really close attention mostly to foliage, though, I like to mix different textures and colors, so some of the plants I have next to each other are REALLY different.

I have a small shade garden - about 12x5 feet, a small rockerie 4x4, a small sunken bog, perennial beds surrounding my lawn, a full-sun berm that's about 10% planted right now, and then farther out a lot of xeriscape shrubs and groundcovers.

My goals are to have (like you), year-long interest, easy watering, a really "full" look (sort of like cottage gardening) and the rainbow effect.

I guess my whole concept of design is really just based on what appeals to me and not some grand scheme - if I really like it, and I think it will grow here, I try to find an area for it. I also have adapted a lot of "wow, that is so cool" looks from mags on a smaller scale here - I have a stepping stone walkway in front of the shade garden with thick moss growing all in between them, it looks really great and its small enough to care for (we're really dry here, so there's no way I could pull off that look on a larger scale). So I get what I want - just scaled down or adapted to fit my needs.

Gardening is such a huge pleasure for me and the results are an expression of who I am and what I like. I think of it like an ever changing sculpture - even if I ever did finish it, it still wouldn't be "finished" since its a living, changing organism.
-C

I love color, and at the front of my yard, along the ditch, I have this "pink" them going, and tend more towards the purple, burgandy side of flowers, but I have a little of everything, really. I'm really not a theme gardener, as far as one bed blue, another purple, it's all about 'balance' for me, so I have many different colors throughout my yard. I do like a 'neat' look to a garden, but I tend to let plants grow their own shapes instead of me shaping them, which I do not like to much, esp. in bushes. My yard has taught me a very interesting thing this year. I only have a small area that is shaded, and the rest is FS, and I had planted Liriope to form the bed, and I'm always changing my yard, and moving plants around, and this one area was bothering me terribly, since last year, and I could never put my finger on "what" was bothering me, but knew I would figure it out eventually, and one day I was in the shade garden, and all of a sudden it hit-me-like-a-freight-train......it was the Liriope!!! So I grabbed the shovel, and dug all of it up, with the exception of a couple clumps, and realized I didn't like the "boundary" that I had set for that area, and also learned that, in my life, I also do not like boundaries that inhibit me from expressing myself the way I need to, or things that keep me from doing what I want to do, and esp. when people put "boundaries" up that cannot be crossed, I do not like that at all.
Everyone needs the room to do what they love doing, and the room to express them creatively, and when these are taken away, we become very unhappy people. Anyway.....gardening is medicine to me, and I absolutely love it, and my husband made the comment to me that I am the happiest when I'm doing research on something, or gardenig, and he's right. It keeps me peaceful and out-of-trouble....lol....sorry if I got off the subject and got "deep" and "weird". I have a lot of artistic ability, and I garden accordingly, so my yard is pretty "free" and "colorful". The people who live around us either call me the Garden Lady or the Flower Lady. I like plants to show "them", and be their own little person's, without me trying to make them into some shape they are not meant to be, but this is just me and how I do it, but it works for me, and makes me happy, and I get a lot of compliments on my yard, so I guess I must be doing something right, although I do not garden for anyone but me because it makes me happy. Anyway.....happy gardening, and you'll figure out exactly what you like and don't, and what works and doesn't. I grow a lot of subtropical's, so this is why my yard has so many colors to it.

My garden is more of a crazy quilt than anything else. Just yesterday, my granddaughter told me that she thought it was nice that I left the dandelions because they look really good with the forget-me-nots and the Johnny-jump-ups. LOL, yes indeed!

I do have three rock surrounded raised beds that I have tried to impose some order to, but they get away from me every year right off the bat. The first one has two David Austin roses, two floribundas and a Rosa viridiflora - obviously the rose bed, and then there are several creeping dianthus, and veronicas and the alpine strawberries and a hellebore, autumn crocus, coral bells, some daisies, the affore mentioned forget-me-nots, etc. The second bed is the wildflower bed, with a dogwood tree in the middle and epimedium, tiarella, bloodroot, dicentra exima, violas, three kinds of lobelia, wild asters, more hellebores, lavender, fern leaved peonies, astilbes, more Johnny-jump-ups, etc. The third bed, I thought I would gain control of from the beginning, but the dead nettle is blooming so nicely that I can't rip it out just yet, and the English daisies did a wonderful job of seeding around and the violas have cross bred with last years pansies and invited a few of them over from another little bed on the other side of the walkway. I have a hard time yanking out anything that is putting out an effort to grow and bloom. I think it may have something to do with the long winters and the fact that I'm getting older, but the dandelions really do look quite nice with the blue and white forget-me-nots!

I've always loved this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Portrait By A Neighbor

Before she has her floor swept
Or her dishes done,
Any day you'll find her
A-sunning in the sun!

It's long after midnight
Her key's in the lock,
And you never see her chimney smoke
Till past ten o'clock!

She digs in her garden
With a shovel and a spoon,
she weeds her lazy lettuce
By the light of the moon.

She walks up the walk
Like a woman in a dream,
She forgets she borrowed butter
And pays you back cream!

Her lawn looks like a meadow,
And if she mows the place
She leaves the clover standing
And the Queen Anne's lace!

I'm a dig and plop kinda gardener. I dig a hole, plop a plant in and wait and see what happens. After it blooms, if I decide I don't like it there, I'll dig a different hole, dig up the plant, and plop it there. LOL

My gardens have no theme. The only thing I try to do is get the bigger plants towards the back of the bed, the shade plants in the shade, and the sun plants in the sun. I'm not always successful at that either. This creates more of the "dig and plop" gardening chores.

I live on the wild side of life, and my gardens definitely show my personality.

I admit it... I'm a planner. BUT I always wind up throwing in a handful of the unplanned and switching this with that at planting time. I like to pay a lot of attention to form and foliage, too. "A frilly next to a spikey next to a moundy". LOL :) Bluegreen leaves, purples, variegateds, and evergreens score major points with me :)

I also shoot for year round interest, but more like late March to frost for me here. I just planted my front mixed beds this Spring and need to add a few things more for winter interest. Love ornamental grasses and other low-maintenance perennials. I plan mostly to keep things low-maintenance. If I plan out the spacing and water needs beforehand, I save a lot of needless work.

I like the full-so-that-no-mulch-shows-except-around-the-perfectly-maincured-edge-of- the-bed look, too :) LOL. To me, a curvey lined bed with a clean line against the grass shaded by tall trees and full of hostas and colorful foliage plants is a dream. Trouble is... I have no shade!!! LOL :) That's okay, though, because I also love the Grandma's Old Fashioned Front Porch type of garden, and I can accomplish that :) LOL!

Last year I decided I was going to plan my new beds better, so I laid them out on graph paper and planted it just so. But I didn't consider that my friend was going to give me some daylilies, one of my students was going to give me some canas, my neighbor was going to give me some esparanzas, my sister was going to give me some vine seeds that she got from in front of a store that she didn't know the name of', my 99 year old church friend was going to give me some "black eyed susan" seeds (read yellow flower with dark brown center), another student was going to give me some rose cuttings she rooted that her mother-in-law gave her when she was first married some 50 years ago, and my secret sister was going to give me some seeds from Walmart! I'd much rather have my present garden than the one laid out on graph paper. :^) :^) :^) :^) (read that smile, joy, happy, good feeling, etc.)

lol, graph paper is for AFTER you plant so you have some idea of what's already there! This probably applies more if you have long winters with deep snow and can't see what's left of what's there when your perusing the seed catalogs in mid January.

Container gardening. Ground is poor, most of the property around the house is in partial or mostly shade, and I can't down to the ground to plant, weed, cultivate, etc. Dotti