With "only" an acre and a half, and many hundreds of plants to explore, experiment with, and enthuse over, there's not an inch to spare. Can this one be a groundcover to that one? Can this one peak in Spring and then go dormant, so that that one can grow up, peaking in August, in the very same spot?
With every spot and almost every plant doing such double duty, each tree is paired with some sort of climbing or sprawling plant. Why be just a tree when you can also be a scaffold?
The property came with this old star magnolia—the right two-thirds of all that foliage above the fence between me and my tedious neighbor—whose hundreds of white flowers are a welcome thrill in April. But then, just green leaves from May to October? No way, Jose. If a tree is, oh, twenty feet tall and wide, then it needs to play host to a vine that also gets, oh, twenty feet tall and wide. And one that blooms when the tree doesn't.
Like this unusual white clematis.
I planted it six feet to the left of the magnolia trunk... ...and guided it up a bamboo pole until it could grab onto the magnolia canopy. And six weeks after the magnolia's April flowers are only a faint memory—June in other words—it starts to bloom.
At first, it seems like Autumn clematis. But this is June not September.  And the flowers are twice as big.

This is Clematis 'Paul Farges', AKA Clematis fargesii, AKA (yuck) Clematis potaninii variorum potaninii. For a couple of years I wasn't sure just where up in the canopy it was heading...

...but then, from the second floor windows, I saw the flowers almost up at the top of the magnolia.

See?  The white patch of flowers at the center?

This Paul Farges is still but a stripling, and adolescent.  It has many yards to climb, many more branches to explore. Why not have the entire magnolia spangled with its white blossoms?
To help Paul get the jump on more of the magnolia, I found this side tendril trudging dutifully atop the groundcovering mayapple, heading right toward the magnolia trunk at the right.
It's better not to have the tendril grab onto the trunk itself: Then it would climb up right into the deep shade at the center of the canopy. Slow going in that darkness I'm sure. Better to guide it further, then, to the sunnier outer shell of foliage at the opposite side of the tree.
So I rigged up bamboo "aide-de-hauteur" for it to climb up. It just reaches. Grab on, sweetie!
The tendril should be high enough by August to begin pole vaulting up into the magnolia canopy on its own.
By 2011, the magnolia should be spangled on both sides, right and left, fore and aft.

And by, who knows?, 2014, the entire magnolia will seem to bloom in April—and then bloom again in June, July, August, & September, but with entirely different flowers.