Those who know us, and especially those who visited the previous Anchovy World Headquarters, know that lawn is a temporary condition, a place-holder until the gardens go in. You can see the immediate plans for the front yard in these photos. Extending the garden along the house and building one new garden will be the extent of the work for this year. Both new gardens will be raised. Stay tuned in the coming weeks…I’ll post shots later on of these gardens once we get some plant in. Of course a perennial garden takes time to mature and come into its own. That’s part of the fun of it. Each year as it matures it gets more lush and more interesting.
The big new garden is in the sunniest part of a fairly shady lot. There is a locust on our property and our neighbour has a tamarac and a spruce blocking out some sun from the south. We’re in zone 6 in Toronto, but the micro-climate here by the lake is perhaps a little more moderate than that. The new garden will feature at least one big rock and at least one shrub. You can see there is a Japanese Maple we planted at the top of the garden shortly after moving in. Garden suggestions are welcome.
By the way, that patch in the front yard that looks like a grave was dug by the City during the winter. They replaced the water service on our street. The City runs the water into the yard and provides a shut-off. We then had the same contractor run the new service right into the house to replace the old pipes with bigger copper ones.
27th Street 
oh so that’s not a grave? I’m disappointed 😉
This is also an opportunity to get creative. Lose the big rock and instead lay a 3 foot square area of concrete patio stone. You use it as a display area for sculpture and invite your artsy buddies to display their works on your lawn for 2-3 months (of course without charging them for the exposure) . After a couple of years of rotating art work, the garden will become known as the Anchovy Gallery and will be a amous landmark. For those days when you dont have a sculpture to display because your artist buddies have failed you then you can set a nice birdbath on the patio stones or failing that a chair where you could offer squeezebox performances from the garden on saturday afternoons. A big rock is just a big rock and you can do better.
I’d consider a large sculpture or even a large architectural element on the remaining grass, but not on the garden itself. The cats would love a birdbath. It would increase their kill rate many-fold. Any water elements attract raccoons and we have very aggressive ones around here. On Blackthorn, I gave up maintaining a water element because they loved to tear up the pump and chew on it, leaving it stranded and broken on dry land. Because of the cats, we also don’t have bird feeders. The cats nail occasional birds and well that’s life, but I don’t want to encourage it.
Rocks. Well, I like rocks.
The garden is going to be raised in a mound that will be not quite centred. Got any suggestions for a couple good anchor shrubs? In spite of the trees, the spot gets decent afternoon sun (enough that I was concerned about sunburn working out there yesterday), but not much morning sun.
It is likely too late for this because you have already spread your soil, but have you considered flipping the big front garden 180 towards the back left? That would put the open side of the curve facing the road and would look sort of inviting maybe. It would also let you snake an interesting path between the foundation garden and the big garden that would lead to the driveway. An added benefit would be that it keeps the grass in one solid block and eliminates all the narrow strips between the sidewalks and the curved part of the garden. The narrow strips will be a pain to mow and wont really be wide enough to let the grass grow well. Then, in the curved grass area you have an opportunity to plunk something like a small Montmorency cherry tree in the middle of the grass or another Japanese maple.
Your suggestions are appreciated, but we’re settled on the shape for a host of reasons, not the least of which is that it simply feels right to us in the context of the yard..
I considered a number of approaches What you don’t see in the photo is the honkin’ big locust tree just off to the left of the frame of the picture. Imagine the curve of the garden echoing the shape of the locust above it.
Another consideration is that there is no real path between the driveway and the front porch. I’m leaving a grass walkway where we normally walk to and from the cars.
I actually like the small strips of grass because they give shape to it in counterpoint to the garden