If there’s a part of your yard that you’ve been avoiding because it seems too dark to support any interesting plants, maybe it’s time you met some shady characters.
“Just because you have a shady lot doesn’t mean you’re dead in the water,” says Cathie Guse, a manager of the Crystal Lake nursery Flowerwood. “There are a whole lot of plants that can do really well in the shade, and they’re not as touchy as some people think they are.”
Compared to gardening in the shade, creating a sun garden is pretty easy. In a full-sun spot, no matter how lousy your soil is, or what size and shape plant you prefer, there’s never any shortage of candidates who can provide big, colorful blooms.
The palette of shade plants is a bit more limited, but it too can meet almost any conditions and tastes.
Nevertheless, the shade team simply can’t compete with the sun team on bold flower colors. “Most of those brightly colored plants that everybody’s attracted to need the sun [to create] that color,” Guse says. “In the shade, you’re going to have to go for more of a foliage display and look at textures and shapes more than the flowers.”
Fortunately, the plant world has turned out a whole slew of shade plants with foliage that’s as bold and interesting as any flower. Alone, any of these plants is attractive enough, but the trick is to combine several varieties of foliage plants so their leaf textures and colors can play off one another.
The shortest route to making a good foliage combination is to remember that in the garden, opposites attract the eye. A fat leaf and a skinny one will mingle together, accentuating each one as a complement to the other. That’s how two stalwarts of the shade garden, ferns and hostas, wind up together so often. With those two, it’s not only wide and narrow, but the hosta’s substantial, often puckered, leaf versus the fern’s airy fronds.
Nice combinations can also be had from plants with similar features. A grayish blue-leafed hosta can sit nicely against the gray-blue leaves of black cohosh, (ci micifuga racemosa).
Hostas, in fact, make good counterparts to many shade plants, because they’re among the few big-leafed options for dark places and they offer an enormous range of looks. When you think hostas, don’t automatically picture the vastly overused and visually boring selections with ordinary green banana-shaped leaves. Those are the ones many gardeners are just plain tired of, and they’ll tire your eyes quickly.
“You don’t have to put in a row of the same old hostas. The variety of hostas these days is fabulous,” says Ruth Tamminga, the owner of Plum Creek Nursery in Crete.
There are round leaves and pointy, striped and one-colored, puckered and flat, and all in assorted combinations of yellow, green, blue and white. Some of Tamminga’s favorite hostas are “Sum and Substance,” with huge chartreuse leaves; “Great Expectations,” whose big blue leaves are splashed with chartreuse in the center; and “Regal Splendor,” with neat white rims around their blue-green leaves.
Because they’re so reliable, hostas should play a role in almost any shade garden, but they need some strong partners if the space is going to shine. Some of the best and showiest perennials for a Chicago-area shade garden are:
– Astilbes. Their toothy, sometimes red foliage, is attractive itself, but then come the blooms, upright plumes of color that stand over the leaves in mid- to late summer. “You get some really good bloom colors from astilbes–bright pinks and reds to peach and dusty pinks,” says Jan Sorensen, president of The Natural Garden, a St. Charles nursery. Astilbes like most soils, but don’t do well in clay.
– Dicentras. The best known is bleeding heart (dicentra spectabilis), with those bright red heart-shaped blooms hanging from its stems. But there are others, including a white version of bleeding heart (dicentra spectabilis f. alba) and Dutchman’s breeches (dicentra cucullaria), whose two-lobed flowers are supposed to look like a pair of pants hanging out to dry. They’re all dramatic highlights of spring, but most lose even their foliage by mid-summer, so they shouldn’t be put where a bare spot will be annoying. They all like moist, rich soil.
– Ferns. Like hostas, they’re hardy, reliable and often used in boring ways. They don’t have to be; carefully sprinkled among other shade plants, ferns of all kinds can give a shade garden a loose and natural look. For a change from the big upright green ferns, check out Japanese painted fern (athyrium niponicum), which has purplish stems and foliage that goes from green at the tips through gray and white as it nears the stems. It likes moist, fertile soil.
– Hake Grass (hakonechloa macra `Aureola’). Among the very popular ornamental grasses, there are very few that prefer shade. Hake grass is a cascading mass of green-and-yellow leaves that makes its corner of the shade look sunlit. “It’s really nice at the edge of a wall or somewhere that lets it spill down,” Sorensen says. She also recommends a green-only variety, hakonechloa macra, which she says is a bit hardier in Chicago winters and “has the brighter, light green of new growth on evergreens.” Hake grass likes rich, moist soil.
– Lungworts (pulmonaria). Their green leaves freckled with white have made lungworts very popular with shade gardeners in recent years, Tamminga says. “People who are looking for interesting leaves go right to the pulmonarias,” she says. The added attraction is the graceful bloom–in blue, white or pink, depending on the variety. They’ll get along with any soil that does not stay wet.
– Tufted Hair Grass (deschampsia cespitosa). This is another ornamental grass that can stand partial shade, and it brings the familiar upright, billowy look that has made grasses so beloved in the sun garden. It can reach 6 feet high and likes dry soil. “Tufted hair grass looks like the sun is shining through it even in the shade, and if the sun does shine through, it becomes breathtaking,” Sorensen says.
Some other perennial plants that do well in shade are brown-leafed heucheras, yellow-flowering celandine poppies (stylophorum diphyllum), black cohosh, and Solomon’s seal (polygonatum).
