Most of my plants will not work for you since I live in the Oakland hills, just at the edge of the SF fog belt. But when I look at your photos, there seems to be little foliage variety. It's not just all the round shapes being the same height - there's little variation in color, texture, and leaf shape. Everything seems very small-leafed except for the spiky plants. I'm afraid that rosemary will only add to that overall effect. If one were looking from across the street, I think the plants you have mostly blur together. Much as I love bougainvillea and it grows well in your area, I'd be a little leery about planting it near any pathway. They have pretty ferocious thorns and your walkway isn't very wide. I've had shrub roses rip pant legs apart because I had them beside a walkway. Plants always like to grow where it's open - I have a lot of narrow beds, and it's a fight to keep the plants from "leaning" out into the paths. I do a lot of staking and tying (plant bondage, what fun...NOT)! I adore foliage; evergreens are the mainstay in my garden. Flower colors come and go in a month, but 'good bones'; e.g., handsome shrubs look as good in January as they do in July. Being an amateur, I'll post some of my photos (taken at different times from 2008-2011) to hopefully show what I mean. You will see we are dealing with a more severe slope than you have, so we have done a lot of terracing that isn't shown in these shots. Anyway, maybe the photos will help spark some ideas for you! Front: Early spring, so nasturtium leaves add a brighter green note and nice round shape. Notice, BTW, the 'Tuscan Blue' upright rosemary that is against the house, underneath that white awning over the front window. See what I mean about the small leaves? From far away, they just blur visually. Early spring: notice the LH corner, where the small white flowers (Iberis) are at the corner of our front walkway In the photo above, iberis was in flower with the bearded iris dormant. At its peak in April/May, here's the explosion of color when the iris bloom: On the shady side, this bed is terraced into two halves. I read somewhere that the eye can discern more shades of green than any other color. Every one of these green plants is a slightly different shade, in addition to the difference in leaf shape and size: Backyard, looking downwards (from my neighbor's sidewalk) towards our shed. The plants you see are in a terraced bed approx. 3' higher than the ground level of the shed. See how the fine leaves of the Coleonema are set off by the darker, round-leafed pelargonium and the bigger leaves of the Meyer lemon (left side) and variegated euonymus (right side)? A closer look at the bed above. It is in partial sun and is NEVER watered in summer. It lives on the runoff all the way from the front of the house, some 75' uphill:

Digging out my old notebooks would be a chore, but I clearly remember seeing trees less than 2 m. tall that were hemispherical, and that had grown well, not stuntedly slow. They had secondary foliage. Some of the California seedlings I've peered at through the fence are unbranched spikes of electric blue juvenile needles a meter tall. Pretty weird. In natural habitat stone pines are seeded by magpies. Here the jays seem to do the job.

Ahh, ok - so I've figured out why they call it 'choke' berry. Because you want to choke it for putting up all those suckers!!!!! Yeah, when we moved in, that whole garden area was taken up with this stuff - it was like a solid mass of shrubbery about 2 ft high. As we started trying to dig it up, we discovered a whole network of roots. Between the chokeberry and the aspen trees (which we cut down), it was a massive system that took many man hours to hack through - this was my DH project he took on. He even used a heavy duty plow to dig into the cable-like roots. What a mess!!! But he was successful at getting most of it on the surface and several inches below pretty cleaned out. We kept after it by pulling up the new shoots that kept coming up, and then covered the whole area last fall with some rough tree limb mulch that the city of Westminster makes available from the tree limb dumping site. I thought maybe that would help smother the stuff, but don't think so. I've pretty much decided only to have the fruit trees there (hopefully they will grow and the tent caterpillers won't take them out!) and some daylilies and a few other plants bordering the outside of the bed - nothing planned for the middle area (except maybe some pumpkin vines this summer/fall) so we can continue to get in there and dig more roots out. Maybe eventually we have it under better control. Marj

Seems like most everybody (sorry, kat__wa) is pleased with their purchases. Thanks, deamn, for telling me about the 2-3 weeks wait. I guess that's about par for the course. By then my toenails will be longer and easier to cut! I do wonder if it is just Discover Card that they reject? I know Discover charges the merchant more than some other cards and that is why some stores don't take Discover Card. I didn't remember who posted the site, but thanks, SandyIA. I've had it on my Desktop and check it every day, but this is the first thing I've ordered. I got a pack of ads from Starcrest in the mail a couple days ago. I am so pleased with the fanny pack I ordered from them. I've already seen a couple things for my next order. Today I was poking around on some of the other Deal sites and found the Mother Lode! I looked at some of them; if we get snowed in again, I'll be checking out some more of them. I appreciate finding odds and ends that I want/need without having to run in and out of every store looking for them. Sue Here is a link that might be useful: More Deal Sites