I have a couple of narrow areas like this in my yard, although I don't view them they way you do this one, and my policy is that I want it to be pleasant to get IN there because I have to tend them no matter what they are - weed, sweep, rake, what have you. (Most recently, what I have is to repair some digging that a skunk or something is doing to try to get under the adjacent garage). So my priority would be an area of paving - I would say large slabs so there are fewer cracks to catch weed seeds, and if you want it to be really easy to lay, make it rubber - I get mine at Canadian Tire, Home Depot has something similar for patios, but maybe someone else would sell some form of it as garage flooring. If you do pavers, it would be worth doing an attractive pattern since you look down on the area. You could either run this surface the perimeter of the area, if you want it to be a full planting most of the year that you just go in to clean up in fall, or you could make the central area a hard surface, bordered with plantings, and maybe a central container or other focal point. The perimeter idea might work better, because plants will grow best in the centre of this area where they are not getting light from only one side or a strange angle. To get the best of both options, you might do just a horseshoe shaped area of plants with paving both at the perimeter and up the centre. You can have some design fun here since the area is isolated and does not have to "go" with the rest of your yard. It would also lend itself to a pond, but that is so not my thing that I couldn't tell you a thing about how to do it. Or a Japanse zen garden... and ditto on that. Karin L

Gobluedjm, the landlady doesn't want to be bothered with fixing anything whatsoever unless it's an immediate emergency (and even then, only grudgingly, often after yelling at us that we ought to just fix things ourselves at our own expense). So unless the flooded yard starts producing toxic mold or something, we're out of luck there. Renee, your patios and paths are gorgeous! I'm not sure it would make sense to create a work of art like that in a rental, though; I might get halfway done creating it and then move out, and it would just be a bother for the landlady to have to remove so many pieces of rock and bricks that never coalesced into a finished pathway. Or even if I finished it, the landlady might still hate it and find it annoyingly difficult to remove. Sue and Renee, I'm definitely interested in improving the drainage ditch, including lengthening it, widening it, possibly deepening it (though deepening it is a bit more difficult) and turning it into a dry stream bed. I need some advice about how to do those things, though. Currently, mud tends to gradually fill in the drainage ditch over time, so I have to re-dig it about twice a year. That would need to stop before I could turn it into a dry streambed, or else the rocks would just end up buried under the mud, and it would be ten times as difficult to re-dig with all the rocks in it. I believe Renee has mentioned something in the past about using plants around the edges of a drainage ditch to hold the dirt in place and prevent the mud from filling it in. I'm interested in doing that, but I'm not quite sure where to start. Should the plants go on the walls of the drainage ditch, or on the flat surface right above the drainage ditch? Does it depend on the plant? I'm especially thinking of trying Carex pregracilis there, but I'm not sure whether to put it on the flat surface or on the walls of the ditch. Currently the drainage ditch is about 12" to 18" deep and 12" to 18" high. It feels like a little bit of a hazard at times, because I've occasionally stepped into it without having realized I was so close to it. I think that making it deeper would make it more dangerous and also more prone to filling with mud, whereas making it wider might make it less dangerous, more useable as a pathway for the dogs, and hopefully less prone to filling with mud. What do you think? I'm aware that the path should ideally be wider. I'm not looking forward to widening it, though, because to widen the path I have to move the drainage ditch over. The only thing more discouraging than digging a drainage ditch through icky clay is trying to move that drainage ditch later - building the soil back up on one side while removing it from the other side. I already had to move it slightly just to fit the path in at all. I'm having a hard time imagining how to fit raised beds into my very naturalistic garden design style. Renee, if you were putting a raised bed made from scrap lumber into my yard, where you place it? Sue's suggestion of berms seems more my style, but I'm not terribly sure where I'd want to put the berms, either. The soil is only very slightly sloped upward near the house as a result of my efforts last year to excavate the existing drainage ditch and mound the excess soil along the house. I want to make sure that any additional berms I might put in would not accidentally redirect the water back toward the foundation of the house again. I don't think I have the dedication to keep plants alive in pots in the summer. I lose too many plants to drought already every summer, even when they're planted directly in the ground. I'm definitely aiming to create the kind of garden where the plants are mostly self-sufficient and, though they might benefit from regular weeding and occasional watering, would not drop dead if I occasionally ignored them for a couple of weeks.

I'm with the stones-and ground cover crowd. I'd use big squares of bluestone or a concrete paver you like, plant vinca minor (the dark green small-leaved periwinkle), put in tons of daffodil bulbs to come up through it in the spring and be gone by the time you have to do maintenance, and mulch heavily so you can be patient for the two or three seasons it takes for the periwinkle to make a dense, thick mat. Absolutely worth the wait. And then, because the area doesn't go anywhere, I'd put an exterior grade full length mirror on the back skinny wall, surround it with natural trellising, plant a vine to cover it eventually (not ivy - a huge headache to control), and set a big birdbath just in front of the mirror. The mirror solves the dead-end problem and throws the light around a bit, the vine and trellis furnish and mask the wall, the birdbath gives you a focal point, the vinca is deep and soft, and the big stepping stones give the space some scale and a comfortable surface to walk down and to support the tasks of maintenance. A large-scale edited scheme like this would give your skinny little alleyway some real presence. It's a perfect "go big or go home" situation!

Most of the 30 or so small trees that I planted in my new yard are, by all considerations, too close together. But my strategy wasn't just for the fact that I might loose a few. I also wanted to get some wind protection in winter and ground shade during the summer and I don't want to wait 15-20 years for it. I can consider moving (or removing) some of them within the next few years, after I see if everything makes the winter and grows good. After a while, I'll thin the evergreens intended for wind protection. So I'm not worried so much about any of it, at least for the first 5-10 years. It will be an ongoing project, depending on a lot of things.