The pool garden begins

The pool garden begins, originally uploaded by chels580.

Goals
The first thing I learned from reading about garden design is to think about the goals of the garden.
Rabbit trail: Whenever I use the word garden, I am referring to a flower garden and not a vegetable garden. Now, while I feel a bit guilty about throwing myself into cultivating the land and producing nothing (well, nothing edible), I have several reasons not to plant veggies.
1)I don't have time to weed, water, or harvest.
2)With just the two of us, I don't want tomatoes up to my elbows or zucchini coming out of my woohoo.
3)I am not willing to put all that work into it, only to feed the birds, bugs, slime molds, and the neighbor's woodchuck.
In short, I have no hope for a veggie garden. If you can suggest a perennial vegetable that I can set and forget, I might think about it. Actually, asparagus comes to mind. I should think about that...
Right. Goals.

Because there are views of the garden from the kitchen windows and coming to the house from the driveway I wanted it to be both soothing and welcoming. For soothing, I chose white, yellow and green. I really like the soothing combination of green and white and yellow is one of the easiest colors to see (not receding like blue or advancing like red ). I added some purple lowlights, so hopefully its not boring too. For welcoming, I added a winding path through the middle.

Dirt
When I first calculated how much dirt we would need to buy, I was naively hoping that I could make a mound up to six inches high. Um, yeah, that would have been my whole budget. So I settled for half of that--4cubic yards of compost and 2 cubic yards of top soil. It took two days of shoveling, wheelbarrowing, and raking. I loved it, because all throughout I kept thinking, "This is gonna be the best garden ever!" I may even have had a maniacal grin on my face. I'm not exactly sure what was going through my Sweetheart's head to motivate him, but lets call it love.

Plants
I bought most of the plants by mail-order, except some that I ordered online and then picked up at the farmer's market (which I shall refer to as the great daisy debacle). And for you goofy people like me, here a plant list:
Alchemilla mollis 'Thriller''
Anemone xhybrida 'Honorine Jobert'
Arum Italicum
Acteae (Cimicifuga) ramosa 'Hillside black beauty''
Dicentra Spectabilis Alba
Digitalis grandiflora
Heuchera 'Palace Purple'
Hydrangea arborescens 'White dome'
Itea virginica 'Little Henry'
Lamium maculatum 'White Nancy'
Ligularia dentata 'Desdemona'
Polygonatum biflorum
Pulsatilla vulgaris
Stylophorum diphillum
Smilacena racemosa
Tiarella cordifolia
Carex Hachijoensis 'Evergold'
Pulmonaria officinalis 'Sissinghurst white'
IRIS sibirica 'Caesar's Brother'
THALICTRUM Glaucum
HOSTA 'August moon'
Echinacea Pupurea 'White Swan'
Chrysanthemum Superbum 'Crazy Daisy'
Ratibida Columnifera Yellow
Eupatorum Maculatum 'Chocolate'
Ajuga 'Chocolate Chip'
Earlicheer Daffodils
White Daffodils
Geranium