Shade-Loving Perennials for Your Garden

What I love about shade perennials: Their ability to provide long-term beauty and aesthetic value to darker garden spaces.  Shade perennials are also contributing to a more sustainable, low-maintenance, and worry-free garden. Here are my suggestions for tried plants that are thriving in my shaded part of the garden. 

Ligularia

This attractive perennial thrives in wet and shady environments, so it’s perfect for dark and medium to moist areas (or where you water regularly).  The underside of the leaves is magenta and the blooms are either yellow spikes or sunflower-like. 

Hostas

They tolerate heavy shade, especially the blue-green variety, but grow best in partial shade with some morning sun. The trick to keeping this leafy plant healthy is to keep the soil consistently moist.  Mix different colors and types for the best impressions.

Bleeding Heart

No matter if you choose the pink or white variety, Bleeding Hearts always lightens up shade spots in your garden and butterflies love these perennials. They grow well in half or full shade and well-drained moist soil.

Columbine

This flower performs best in half-shade and brings color to your yard. Hummingbirds are attracted to them too. Columbines don’t need especially moist soil and self-seed. 

Japanese Painted Fern
Attractive with their grey-green, maroon hue leaves 

Contrary to ordinary ferns this plant is not invasive, and it grows in full and partial shade. They love well-drained soil and don’t plant it directly under trees for the plant to flourish.

Heuchera / Coral Bells

Yellow, orange, copper, green, magenta… They like partial shade and medium watering. Remove faded pedals to help new flowers bloom - as you should do it with every blooming flower in your garden.

These are just a few suggestions, but many more plants that don’t mind - and even thrive - in shade areas, such as Salomon´s Seal, Daffodils, Jack Frost Siberian Bugloss, Hydrangeas, Lungwort, Pachysandra, Brunnera, Hellebores, and many more.

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Shade Gardens

Shade gardeners have a great number of gorgeous plants available to them. Here is a list of wonderful plants that will thrive in three to four hours of sun or less.



FLOWERS

Coral Bells (Heuchera)
For show-stopping color in the shade garden, coral bells are unbeatable. Recent breeding has produced plants with foliage in just about every color imaginable, from coppery orange to pure black; deep purple to chartreuse.
Coral bells do great in part to full shade, and form low mounds of foliage. They also produce flower spikes of delicate, bell-shaped blooms. Depending on the cultivar, coral bells are hardy in zones three through nine.

Astilbe (Astilbe)
Astilbes (hardy in zones four through nine) grow wonderfully in part to full shade, as long as they are in nice, moist soil. It produces feathery plumes in white, pink, purple, peach, or red in late spring through summer. Astilbe also self-sows readily, but the seedlings are unlikely to look like the original. In a naturalistic, informal setting, this can be a very attractive look.

Bleeding Heart (Dicentra spectabilis)
Bleeding Heart is an old-fashioned, absolutely beautiful plant for shade gardens. In spring to early summer, delicate, dangling flowers will appear, looking like rows of heart-shaped lockets. Bleeding Heart blooms in shades of white, pink, purple, and red, and grows up to four feet tall and three feet wide. It dislikes summer heat, however, and may go dormant if it is allowed to dry out. Not to worry--it will come back just fine in the spring. Bleeding heart thrives in part to full shade in zones two through nine. If it gets sun, morning sun is preferable to afternoon sun, which can be much too hot.


SHRUBS FOR SHADED AREAS

Kerria Japonica: (K. Japonica): If you have a wooded lot with dense shade, this is the summer shrub for you. This tough, disease free, small woody plant bursts into a mass of golden blooms in early summer, continues intermittently all summer, then explodes again in fall. Looks lovely under the trees in a woodland garden. A real show-stopper, the Kerria Japonica will give you years of pleasure, as it slowly grows to a mere 5 feet.
Kerria Japonica is evergreen all year, in all but the most northern gardens. Zone:5-8

Cornus racemosa (Grey Dogwood) zone 4 (1.5-3m) This easily grown shrub has white flowers, followed by white berries on red stalks and purple fall foliage.

Corylus spp. (Hazels) zone 5-9 (3-12m) These shrubs can have various forms from twisted corkscrews to regular pyramidal growth and they produce nuts in the fall.

Hamamelis virginiana (Common Witch-hazel) zone 4 (5m). This fall blooming shrub produces yellow flowers about the time other trees are losing their leaves.

Or plant the variety that blooms in February / March: Hamamelis mollis Boskoop - Chinese Hazel The best antidote to winter is a planting of Witch Hazels. This genus of five species of upright, spreading shrubs or small trees provides the first big display of color, beginning in late February or early March and continuing for six weeks or more depending on the season (the flower petals sensibly curl up if the temperatures plummet). They need at least four hours of sun.

Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle' (Snowhill Hydrangea) zone 2b-9 (1.3m) grows well in deep shade, and bears large trusses of white flowers in August and September.

Kalmia latifolia (Mountain-Laurel) zone 4 (10m) is an evergreen shrub with pink, white or red flowers in mid-June.

Seeds, seeds, seeds

I must admit, right now I am in a shopping spree.

But those web pages are too tempting... Searching for Lavender seeds I found GardensNorth.com, a company with huge variety of seeds, mostly native to Canada, germination tips and discription of plants, topped by beautiful images, I just could not stop adding to my shopping cart.

And then I need a larger house to have space for all these trays and pots... My whole desk is occupied, the tables, kitchen counter, window sills, the oven ... I will have to go to a restaurant every day for the next weeks due to lack of space to cook and eat at home. Just kidding!

See what I bought:
ANEMONE canadensis
CLEMATIS potaninii

EUPHORBIA polychroma

CHAENOMELES japonica

CORNUS officinalis

HOSTA sieboldiana elegans

LINUM flavum 'Compactum'
LAVANDULA angustifolia

MALUS floribunda

POTENTILLA fruticosa

ROSA rugosa

But that's not all: Last fall I collected pounds of Castor, Heuchera, Armeria, Salvia, Sedum and Brugmansia seeds in my garden, that are waiting to be seeded.

I will be very busy for the next weeks to nurture them all ...