The structure is built out of solid cedar timbers. Nearly every joint is mortise and tenon and held together using wooden pegs, as you see in the photos. All that remains is for the homeowner to add a table and a few chairs and a 'candlelier'.

We look forward to the plantings surrounding this garden room to fill in over the next few years as the garden fills in as we designed.

As you can see in the photo, the pipe allows you to lay out the curves and continually adjust them until you have the shape you want. I use concrete form board spikes to hold my pipe in place. Once happy, take a can of marking paint and mark off the curve. In the case of this photo, once marked, I ran a bed-edger along the long curved lines to create the new bed space. More time was spent adjusting the pipe and setting the lines than actually running the bed edger machine. But in the end, the pipe allows you to create beautiful flowing curves over long distances. In the case of this photo, I was using 120 feet of pipe to create the long bedlines.

We use the same trick in marking off curves on patios and walkways made of concrete, pavers, and stone. It is nearly impossible to free-hand mark a long flowing curve, but with a few pieces of fairly inexpensive PVC pipe, it becomes quite easy.

Since they both love their birds, several goals of the project were to further incorporate the wildlife activity in their garden. The focal point remained the main set of feeders, and we worked to enhance the setting around it. We also knew that when they go to sell the house, it needed to stand alone without the feeders.

We enhanced the area by creating elevations in the yard with informal dry stack fieldstone walls. We also created a sitting area with a small pondless water feature, mainly to serve as a water source for the birds. We designed and installed the stream to create slower moving sections of water that birds will be able to bathe and drink from. By being a pondless feature, the overall maintenance is reduced for the homeowners. We used a larger slab of natural stone to bridge the stream to turn the sitting area into a destination area, even though it is only a few steps from the main path. The stream and bridge allow it to be feel set apart from the rest of the garden area.

The homeowners are thrilled, and as the husband said to describe their new garden, "For you bird lovers, eat your heart out."

It reminds me of Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum) based on the leaves and similar shape of the flowers, but the flowers are appearing on the ends, not along the stems like Winter Jasmine. It is also not the season for winter jasmine. Thanks for the help.

We removed all the grass, and after adding several tons of different rocks, the homeowner has a new yard. The overall desire was to keep it looking very natural. The 400 groundcovers, 86 perennials, 48 shrubs, and 1 tree will now need to grow and fill in the areas. In just a couple years, I will have to return to take photos of the area as it matures.