Last year I seriously began the Herculean task of trying to
seriously mulch my very, very large "garden" here in Tuscany, Italy. I put this in quotes,
because much of the space in my woodland which I'm making into a rose
garden is still completely uncultivated,choked with thick wild grasses
and brambles. The cultivated areas where I have the roses planted were
all so weedy that I couldn't really plant any perennials successfully;
they all became suffocated by weeds. So I bought a truckload of wood
chips, and collected cardboard, and put down the cardboard and dumped
chips on top. It was an enormous amount of exhausting work, and now,
less than a year later, I see that it's time to re-do the whole thing!
It DID work very well at taming the weed situation, however,but I am
afraid that if I don't intervene again fairly quickly I'll be right back
where I started.

This is not going to be sustainable, I can see, because the chips are
expensive,so I can't really afford to make them deep enough ( with one
truckload I was not even able to do the whole garden; not even half of
it, I think...) and it is physically impossible to re-do such a huge job
every year anyway! So I definitely want to get some perennials in
there;it would be prettier anyway,and I think that if I concentrate on
evergreen ground-covery stuff I will be able to get the upper hand on
the weeds. My questions: how far away from the bases of the roses should
I plant my groundcover plants? I know that many of you have perennials/groundcovers
with roses and other shrubs: how do you go about feeding the roses with plants all around
their feet? (I want to continue to use my organic matter-type
fertilizing, rather than a product, because my soil is not very good and
does need organic matter). Any suggestions for plants? I already have a
few campanulas ,iberis, and five ceanothus repans,but I'm thinking of
ordering more campanulas, phlox subulata,dianthus, veronica,ajuga and
creeping thyme. Another question: I can see that it will be impossible
to do it all in one season; the garden is just too big, and I have no
running water there, so I have to be very careful about taking on too
much. But too few plants won't make any real impact on the risk of weeds
coming back. How many plants would you start with,for example? How far
apart should I space them?

Please excuse the long post, and thank you all in advance!