JoAnn, I'm excited to see your new walk in spring/summer when the garden fills in again. Looks great!
Arlene, your spruce removal was a big job! It will be fun and interesting observing the changes in the garden this year. We've removed 10 or 11 mature spruce trees from this yard. Several were planted way too close together and too close to the house, creating a prickly cave we had to walk through to enter- those came out first! Some that were healthy when I first moved here started reaching such a size they were shading each other and we started seeing a lot of browning of the bottom branches. There are still 6 or 7 that look okay. They make a nice dark green backdrop for the garden but I've learned not to bring the garden right up to the base of the spruce- they start eating garden space pretty fast.
There were also several old forsythia bushes here that had been long neglected and had layered themselves, forming large thickets. I've tried to tame them but they've never bloomed all that profusely, so we've cut most of them out this winter. That has made the back yard much bigger and opens the door for a garden expansion. I need more garden space like a hole in the head, but I'm doing it anyway. I'd been looking at several irises in muted, autumnal tones (that don't look good at all with the rest of my garden beds) and now have a great space do design a garden in those colors. While I don't care for those muted colors with other floral colors, I do love how they play off of bronze and amber foliage plants.
