Nico, I just responded to your raised bed question.

How small are these stones? Are they pebble sized or fist sized or what. Are they rounded?

I was suggesting that you could set up an evergreen garden with a combination of wood mulching and stone mulching (tastefully grouped together) (avoid lining the area with rocks).

Also if there's an area your garden that receives a lot of rainwater run offs, - you could create a dry river or creek bed with all those rocks, tastefully flanked with ornamental grasses or shrubs.

The stones are pebble size and smooth. So you wouldn't recommend a rock garden?

I just needed to understand the stone size further. What you have is probably suitable as say mulching material or for something that you would use in between flagstones (walkway).

For rockbeds - this would be nice if used as mulch. I would further recommend that you use a weed barrier cloth before applying the stone mulch on top. Other than the cloth's main purpose, it also helps prevent the stones from sinking into the earth (hence prevents the head ache of digging them out). What sort of plantings do you have in mind?

For the bed design itself, since the driveway is a straight line, you should soften it by using a curvy design, and link it to whatever other bed you'd like to use. Think guitar shape. And no I don't think it's too strange to have 2 different design beds in one lawn. I can advise too that once you have the bed with the flower border done up, you can get it to relate to the other bed, by simply planting a flower of the same kind or colour in the rock bed. -- this is little interior design trick which leads the eye to meander from one are to another.

Ianna