Poppies, lavender, and bouginvillea?

Sure these plants grow in Italy, and IÂll grant the lavender makes sense, but I donÂt immediately think of Italy with the plants youÂve suggested.

My random and amateurish brainstorm of what comes to mind from the phrase "Italian garden" includes the following:

Statuary, marble, tile, stone terrace, terracotta, geometric forms, fountain or pool, clipped evergreen edging to symmetric beds, topiary, enclosure, courtyard, villa, terraces, hanging baskets, urns, mosaic, frescoÂ

Note that there isnÂt any specific flower or plant in the list. IÂm mostly thinking form and materials.

What you can do to suggest "Italian garden" will first depend on the major form(s) that you have to structure this garden. Your home, for instance. It isn't actually clear which way this house faces. You speak of this side and that, rather than front and back. Where exactly would the most pleasant spot be for an outdoor seating area? Got a spot where you could put in a small Italianate wall fountain, a table and chairs, maybe a row of large containers with a tall evergreen to create intimacy, another specimen evergreen in a topiary form, then splashes of color from several hanging baskets or additional containers?

You say "former tenants". Does this mean that your home is a rental? That may limit what you would be willing to do. That's why my example above focuses on things that could be taken away with you at a later date...

Depending on the dollars you have, focusing on one area at a time might be fruitful. The plants, I think, will be secondary.

Wellspring

Back again...Thought you might prefer a more direct answer to what you asked about the plants.

First of all, where are you? That might influence which plants will or will not thrive for you.

I grow lavenders in my 5b / 6a garden. Several cultivars are listed as zone 5. The trickiest thing for getting them to do well is amending my clay soil to provide the good drainage that they need and love.

Bouginvillea is sort of a shrubby vine. I've never grown it myself. I guess another question to ask is whether you could overwinter some of the choices you are interested in? You'd need to learn about growing in containers, about the needs of specific plants, etc., but if "bouginvillea" means Italy to you, maybe you could try one and move it inside for the winter. To me, Italy has such a wide and varied gardening history and culture that I'd look to other climbers. Why not roses? If you like large dramatic flowers, check out some of the clematis. Plenty of rose, rose-red, and red forms, some with huge flowers. And grape vines are certainly a part of many Italian gardens.

I'm not real sure where poppies fit in. I've not grown these in my garden, but there are types that you can grow literally by throwing the seed out on the snow. In other words, they'll grow in your zone if you can adequately meet their other growing requirements.

Wellspring

How about rosemary? Apparently at least some varieties are hardy in zone 6; I don't know if they would need winter protection.

If you Google the images for Italianate gardens, Wellspring summed it up...

Statuary, marble, tile, stone terrace, terracotta, geometric forms, fountain or pool, clipped evergreen edging to symmetric beds, topiary, enclosure, courtyard, villa, terraces, hanging baskets, urns, mosaic, frescoÂ

Everything precise set off by cliped hedging material - boxwood, hollies, yews no doubt work in your zone (your sun conditions notwithstanding). Interesting garden art elements beyond what you find in the cast concrete section of your local garden centers; ie columns, fragments you'd find at architectural salvage.

Climbing roses/clematis in lieu of bougainvillia. Santolina might not be totally hardy for you, but alternate grays could be nepetas, Perovskias, artemesias. Phlox subulata or creeping junipers would soften concrete edges; succulents like hens & chicks come in a variety of colors and can be packed into cracks or tumble out of pots or urns.

I admit to liking poppies and have a couple of Orientals for a punch of color that can be seen from space. Also fell heir to a crop of the common red/orange ones along a part of the property line that are prolific seeders - if I didn't remove many seed pods and shovel them back each August they'd take over.

With a critical look at your property and some real thoughtful planning and research, you could definitely have, at least, an "Italian inspired" garden.

Wow, thank you so much for suggestions/questions!

I didn't want to bore with excruciating details, but I guess some details would have helped.

The house (a row home, which means that it is attached on either side to other houses) has southern exposure on one side, northern on the other.

The side with southern exposure is all concrete and unsightly carport (one that obstructs the bottom half of our view from the living room window), but also houses a small patio that the woman who owned the house before us filled with flowers. Taking out the concrete to put in a smallish garden on that side is not in our budget at this point, so we're really just talking planters on patio and possibly something (ivy?) to cover the top of that unsightly carport.

The side of the house with northern exposure has a small garden with some roses, an obscene amount of cornflowers, three small struggling azaleas, a small and grumpy rhododendron that begrudgingly bloomed two wilted flowers so far this year, tulips and crocuses in the spring, large bald patches where flowers used to be, a holy on the right, a gorgeous maple tree on the left, moss where grass should be, and a well-established network of ant colonies that even our most sustained murderous rampage failed to eliminate.

I inherited this garden two years ago when we bought the house, and by then it had already spent a few years with an owner who was just looking to flip for profit and didn't do any maintenance. I'm a complete novice at gardening, but the garden deserves some attention and desperately needs the overhaul. I am told that you don't need to dig too deep in this area before you hit clay. Because we are in Vancouver (Port Coquitlam, to be exact), we get lots and lots of rain. I tried growing rosemary in a pot, but it got drowned out after the first stretch of summer rain. So did the basil, which I'm now growing indoors.

We were planning extensive work on the garden, but that's still at least three or four years off (kitchen remodel will come first) so I thought I'd roll up my sleeves and just work with what I have for now. I will eventually want to sit down and do the whole landscape design (topiary, stone terrace, terracotta, etc.), but for now am just wondering what plants would even survive in these conditions.

What I really need is to have a gardening expert come move in with us for a week so that s/he could tell me what to do, how to do it, and how to transform this sad and wilted garden into my very own Cinque Terre. Though it might just be easier and cheaper to move to Italy. ;-)

Thank you again for all those suggestions! I feel very undeserving. I will refer to them extensively once the real work here begins. My biggest problem (apart from my not having any experience) is that I can't identify most of the flowers I see in photographs. It took me two weeks to find out that I was admiring a bougainvillea. How sad is that?

You are getting some great advice. There was a similar thread in the past--either on Italian or Provence or similar. The trick, as pointed out above, is not to focus too soon on the same plants, but on forms and what "evokes" the style of garden you relish. Then there will be lots of northern substitutes that evoke the forms, or colors.