Adding some year-round colour to North-facing garden

[Escapegoat]

Mrs Goat has delegated the job of sorting out the front garden to me. At the moment it has a wide selection of poorly-chosen deciduous stuff and not-at-all-chosen self-seeded chaos.

My plan is to go for low-maintenance shrubs - primarily evergreens - to create something that doesn't show us up when we/I don't pay it enough attention. (Ordinarily we don't see the front garden often because we come/go via the back door.)

The front garden is quite small: about 5m across by 4-5m with the usual 1m-wide path. But it's North-facing; it gets a bit of sun first thing in the morning, and a bit more last thing at night, plus overhead sun in the middle of Summer, of course.

Thoughts so far:
Thuja occidentalis Rheingold
Variegated holly
Viburnum?
Prostrate Juniper (instead of lawn/gravel)
Evergreen honeysuckle for climbing
Box
some compact+colourful conifers

Ideas please?

Only one rule: nothing spikey!

[Escapegoat]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll dust off my books and check each of them out.

One thing: don't rhodedendrons get rather big? I'm imagining most of the shrubs being perhaps 50-100cm in diameter when established. There's already a flowering cherry and a magnolia for taller interest (magnolia not doing very well at the moment).

I like the idea of some colourful climbers. There is currently a large and quite vigorous buddleia, which I'd quite like to kill off (sorry bees) and then train some colourful climber to use as a support. As a side q: would the copper nail trick work to kill off the buddleia? (Leaving the woody bits in tact.)