When we bought our house, the back yard landscaping consisted of one extremely large, extremely ugly bush with a million weed vines and several maple and hackberry trees growing in it.

We (well, the part of we that does most of the heavy digging around here) dug out the bush and our next door neighbor gave us a magnolia tree. After planting that, we laid out a large flower bed that wound between the new magnolia the large hackberry in the very back under which was the historic coal dump for the house and where almost nothing grew do to lack of water and soil.

We dug out the turf along the whole new bed (and I actually did a lot of that digging) and started filling it in. Most of the plants were presents divided from other people's gardens or from seeds I begged from neighbors and tossed out to see what would happen, although I did buy a couple things. The first and second years were definitely growing years. We didn't lose too many plants, but things took a while to get used to their new surroundings and we had to add a lot of soil, peat and manure to get things started. Last year, at times, I was pretty happy with the way things were filling in, but it still had bare spots and wasn't finished.

This year, it's full. I love it. Although not much is blooming back there yet, the fullness and all the different leaves are pleasant to look at and the promise of lots of flowers to come is right there.

As my magnolia tree continues to grow and fill out, I'm going to have to move a lot of plants, what is now mostly a full sun bed will be cast into shade. I don't really consider that to be a huge problem though. It just means I'll have plants to put in all those other flower beds I'm planning in my head.