What Are Some Shade Loving Plants For The Garden?

Ground Covers Grow Well In Shaded Areas

If you have a garden that doesn’t get any sun, you may be blessed with lots of trees that provide beautiful shade, or you may simply have buildings or walls that don’t allow for sun to shine into your outdoor areas. 

Either way, there are many plants that thrive without a lot of sun or even a lot of water. In fact, many of these shade loving plants are also overall low-maintenance.

Non-flowering Shade Loving Plants

There are many plants that are colorful and decorative in their own way even though they don’t necessarily flower. These are plants like bamboos, mints, boxwoods, heucheras, ferns, hostas, and variegates.  These plants have distinctive leaves and add a beautiful variety to any garden that doesn’t get sun.

Flowers That Love The Shade

Many people think that because their garden doesn’t get any sun that they can’t have beautiful flowers. Actually, many flowers grow in the shade and provide beautiful color for a longer period of time than the flowers that need sun. The shade loving flowers include periwinkles, hydrangeas, some varieties of roses and azaleas, just to name a few. Some of these flowers can be grown in pots as well, so if you are looking at a terrace garden that doesn’t get a lot of sun, these flowers are perfect. 

Groundcovers

Groundcovers are for those bare dirt places in your garden that don’t get a lot of sun and also the places where nothing seems to grow. A good ground cover will take over these places and not only beatify them, but are practically no-maintenance.  Groundcovers are especially good under trees and around drainage ditches and other places that need something more than just grass or weeds to hide bare dirt. Many ground covers even bloom for added color in a dark corner of the garden.

The only thing that you have to watch with ground cover is that you have to make sure that they don’t take over the whole garden; so they may need to be cut back occasionally. Easy-to-grow ground covers include winter creepers, periwinkles, creeping raspberry, various ivies, sedge grass, hen-and-chicks,  and bluebells, which are only a few of the ground covers that grow almost anywhere and are perfect to fill in the bald spots of a shaded garden.

Trees

If you have an urban garden, you may have a small dark space that is walled in or doesn’t get sun because of neighboring buildings. There may not be enough room for large trees, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a few trees to anchor your garden. The trees that fit neatly into these types of gardens are called understory trees. Understory trees live under taller trees, so they don’t get very big and they don’t need a lot of light.

Some examples of understory trees include dogwood trees, persimmons, serviceberries, winged elms, greenbriers, and spice bushes.  Some of these trees flower in the springtime and go perfect with a ground cover or other shade flowers to create a perfect little urban garden.

So as you can see, no matter where you live or how much shade you have, you can make a beautiful garden with the right kinds of plants and trees.

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Garden Ideas For Year Round Color

Finding Plants That Bloom In Every Season Is Key

Year round color is the goal of many gardeners, and while it may seem like no small feat, it is really rather simple to accomplish. There are plants and bushes that bloom at all different times of the year and it is simply a matter of keeping up with them in order to keep year round color in your garden. So once you have the information for what plants have color in what seasons, you can plan (and plant) ahead.

Even if you have a garden located in an area with four seasons, then you can still keep color year round, unless there is an awfully lot of snow in the winter. Otherwise, your local garden center will have plants for every time of the year that will keep your garden colorful. Perennials are definitely an important part of having year round color. Perennials bloom in their season and then revert back to foliage, but the convenient aspect of perennials is that they only need to be planted one time.

Following are some suggestions about what to plant so that you always have color in your garden:

Spring Color For Your Garden:

Spring blooming bulbs (like tulips) are wonderful to plant because when they bloom they signal that winter is coming to a close. Other flowers that come out in the spring are crocuses, hyacinths, irises, and many other beautiful flowers. However, since springtime is a real boon for flowers, you probably won’t have any problems with color in the spring. Again, the key here is to plant perennials so that you don’t have to replant flowers every year.

Summer Color For Your Garden:

Summer is an easy time to have flowers in the garden as well. Trees in particular will usually bloom in the summer. So if you would like flowering trees, then you should look into planting roses, hydrangea, crape myrtles, yellowwoods, red buckeyes, and summer sweets.

Summertime flowers include asters, carnations, chrysanthemums, and heather to name a few. The thing to remember about these flowers is that while they will come back every year, they will need some help in the springtime to get going again. Talk to your local gardening center to find out how to winterize these summer flowers and you won’t have to replant every year.

There are also plants that attract butterflies to your garden, which adds a whole new dimension of color to your landscape.  These plants include butterfly bushes, button bushes, lilacs, azaleas, hollyhocks, snapdragons, and herbs like sage and oregano.

Fall Color For Your Garden:

There are many plants for the fall that will add color to your garden. Of course, if you have trees with leaves that turn, fall is the most beautiful time for trees - as their leaves will turn to all different shades of amber, yellow and orange. The most common flower for fall is the New York aster, but mums and varieties of sage are also colorful, and many shrubs turn beautiful colors as well.

Winter Color For Your Garden:

Winter is the biggest challenge for color, which mainly comes from evergreen trees and conifers; also there are bushes and trees like dogwoods that have berries in the wintertime that add color to any garden. Flowers that can bloom in milder winters are chrysanthemums, violas, pansies, and the dianthus. These kinds of flowers may be trickier to grow, but once you get the hang of growing them, you will have color year round in your garden. 

See also: WriteYourselfRich.net