Here is my back hill garden at the end of its first season. It stretches across almost the whole width of the backyard and is the widest and deepest bed I've ever designed. It can be viewed almost anywhere in the yard and also the house, so that made it more challenging as well. I spent all last winter planning it.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. Only a few tweaks in mind for next year. The left side here is shadey...
... and the right side is in full sun. That makes it hard to do the "repeat plants for unity" thing. I had to try to tie it together more with repeating colours rather than repeating plants. So I ended up with repeating silver and blue foliage (lamb's ears, russian sage, artemesia, blue oat grass and blue fescue), with red foliage (castor bean, elderberry, penstemon, ninebark, sedum matrona) and blue flowers (clouds of self-seeded borage, catmint, russian sage). I also like to have lots of bearded iris throughout the bed because the shape is so stand-out - the ones in more shade bloom less but the leaves still add great texture (it's my favourite "repeat plant"!). And finally, varying heights of things really helped make such a deep bed look interesting too (rather than just having short plants at the front, medium in the middle, tall ones at the back).
While I also love yellow foliage, I kept it mostly out of this garden because there would have been too much going on. There is lots of yellow in my shade garden, though.
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