Shade Tropical Garden: Part I

For the last year or so we have been stock piling (or maybe hording) plants for our next garden project...the Shade Tropical garden.  Living in North Texas we can't really create a true tropical garden since we have a winter (a mild one, but it does freeze).  The idea of this garden is to create a tropical look using plants for our area.

This garden will be in what we call our front side yard.  We had a really black slate to start with.  Just post oaks (hence the "shade") and grass.  

After we tilled everything up and raked the area out, you can see the outline of the bed.  this process did cause one of neighbors some minor concern.  She couldn't figure out what was wrong with our grass in this area.  I tried to explain that we were putting in a new garden, but I'm not sure that she understood.

Next is plant installation.  We will finally get to used to what we have been storing in the backyard.  There is no formal-on-paper-plan, but we do have a good idea of what is going where.  There will definitely be a lot of Japanese Maples, since we bought some really interesting ones special for this garden.  Once we get everything laid out and planted, we'll post more pictures showing how it turned out.