Northeast Gardening: Flat Garden beds, 1 by grampapa

grampapa wrote:
All of mine are raised beds (like a berm). I have such awful clay and rocks, I had a landscaper come in and build the beds up with better soil. Of course, if you dig down to plant anything you run right into the clay again and have to dig it out and amend.

I think you can also add dimension by varying your plants. What kinds of things do you have in your beds? Do you have shrubs (conifers or some native shrubs perhaps) as backbone behind your perennials and annuals? Also hardscape like boulders, fountains, benches, statuary, etc.

here's a collage of the 'bones' of my Fairy Garden before anything was blooming. you can do the same thing on a smaller scale even with borders