Does This Yard Look Lopsided?

Sometimes I bemoan the fact that my husband has no interest in gardening. He isn’t even interested in the lawn. While other men are aerating, fertilizing, watering, trimming, and over-seeding their grassy acre, I must nag Mike to mow our yard just once a week. I suppose, though, I should count my blessings. Because Mike has absolutely no interest in the yard, he doesn’t mind that my garden is slowly, but surely, consuming the lawn.

Every time I create a new bed, I tell myself, “At last, I have achieved the perfect balance between garden and lawn.” However, it takes just a few months for me to start eying another grassy patch. I have grand plans to tear up the hellstrip and a portion of the lawn along the sidewalk this fall. I will also be tilling and smothering the weed-cover in the north corner of the backyard. Those projects seemed like enough to achieve my final, grand vision until I took a look at our house from the street and realized that the garden looks lopsided! The bright flowers on the sunny left side completely overwhelm the reserved shade garden on the right. The asymmetry has been bothering me ever since. My solution is to create another island bed to the right of the stepping stone walkway, leaving “grass” paths between the new bed and the shade bed behind it and the shrub/shade border to the right. Our house faces southeast, so, although the holly tree will shade the new bed in the early morning, the plants should get six hours of sunlight during the late morning and early afternoon.

I plan on creating my new bed with the same method I used for the magnolia bed: smothering the lawn/weeds with newspaper topped with straw. The 6 – 10 sheets of paper I used in the magnolia bed proved absolutely impenetrable to the existing vegetation. Although the straw did contain grain seeds, they were few and the straw’s attractiveness more than made up for the inconvenience of pulling a few stalks of grain.

The best part of my plan is that I now have a place to plant dwarf forsythia (I’ve been coveting forsythia since last spring), to transplant the perennials I need to thin or move from other beds, and to house my bumper group of winter-sown biennials and perennials. I anticipate no objectsion from Mike, because there will be that much less grass for him to mow.