How I read your sketch — correct me if this is wrong

Everything downstream is built on this, so it's worth thirty seconds:

• 95 ft overall, front (street) to back (yard).
• 0–82 ft: the main bed, 3 ft wide against the house. 246 sq ft.
• 82–89 ft: a 7-ft run where the bed pinches to 2 ft.
• 89–95 ft: the 6×3 ft firewood pad at the back corner, by the chain link.

If the 7-ft and 6-ft segments are the other way round — pad first, then the pinch — say so and I'll flip them. Nothing else in the plans changes; the pad and the last three plants just swap places.

1. A gangway is not one light condition. It's four.

Twenty-two-foot masonry walls, ten feet apart, running the length of the lot. The middle of that slot is the darkest ground you own. The two ends are not — the street end catches raking sun, and the yard corner is bright enough that your roses are blooming in it.

2. The three-foot rule disqualifies half the catalog

Your bed is three feet wide against a wall. That is the whole budget. Roughly half the seventy-four varieties on the reference sheet mature wider than that — Blue Angel↗, Sum & Substance↗, Empress Wu↗, Victory↗, Atlantis↗ all want five to six feet. They don't politely stay small. They grow into the walk, get stepped on and torn, and the leaves pressed against sun-warmed brick scorch on the wall side.

Every plant in all six plans matures at 3.5 ft or less — with one deliberate exception.

3. The soil is the actual project

Your photos show limestone screenings, brick rubble and what looks like coal cinder banked against the foundation. That's not neglect — that's what's under most Chicago bungalow gangways. The trench was backfilled with whatever came out of the excavation in 1925, plus a century of ash. The existing hostas along the walk are surviving on the few inches of leaf litter that have accumulated on top of it.

Hostas are shallow — most of the root mass sits in the top ten inches. That's the good news, because it means you have a choice:

4. It is a slug hotel, and you can design your way out of it

Cool, damp, shaded, walls to hide under, no wind, no ground beetles. If you were designing a slug habitat you'd build a gangway. The good news is that slug resistance is a physical property, not a spray: thick-substanced leaves — which in practice means the blues, because the wax bloom that makes them blue is also what makes them hard to chew — get left alone. Thin-leaved varieties get shredded by June.

Every plan here leans thick. Blue Ridge (plan 5) is the extreme case and would be my pick if slugs are already a problem. One round of iron-phosphate bait at pip emergence in April, and cutting the foliage to the ground after the first hard frost — that's where the eggs overwinter — is the whole programme.

Also worth knowing: a gangway is a rabbit highway, and they'll take new hostas in the first two seasons before the plants get tough. And if the walk gets salted, the first six inches of bed is a splash zone — that's why the mouse ears in these plans sit back from the curb, not on it.

Screening the fence — the corner plant

Here's the honest version. The wood stack is your screen for the bottom three and a half feet of that fence panel; you don't need a plant to do a job the firewood is already doing. What needs covering is the run above the stack and the corner post itself, and the only place you can plant it is the last couple of feet of bed. That corner has four-plus hours of sun — the roses in your photo prove it — so you have real options that the rest of the run doesn't.

Site works — the same for every plan

Add the plant cost from whichever plan you pick. Everything lands between about $1,060.52 and $1,292.40 installed, or roughly $700 more if you do the full trench — which is the only line here I'd argue is worth it if you plan to be in this house another twenty years.