Posted: 22/05/2013 at 17:57
Lavenders and herbs don't like rich wet soil so it all depends what you are going to end up planting.
It sounds to me like you know your stuff by your knowledge of aspect and aesthetics and also have a reasonably good idea about what you want.
I always figure out what I want by knowing what I don't want. That helps me, in your case, apart from being given a bunch of plant names to consider, it's really a personal choice at the end of the day and gardening is never about a one time solution, unless you hire a designer who will do all the research for you, lay garden fabric and sterilise your outdoor space like the cover of a glossy magazine.
There is bound to be mistakes made in your planting scheme, things that don't grow as expected despite what the label says or just don't work in situ but if you start with basic building blocks, you can plant off these and eventually fill in the gaps as you see things grow and take shape.
Personally, I do this in my own gappy garden, using anchor points of evergreen and structure which I then plant off of, building over many seasons, what I couldn't have known at the beginning, but ends up exactly how I like it.
