I’ve been filling in the front yard with divided plants from the Tranquil Garden (aka the backyard) and it struck me that I feel like a painter with a blank canvas in front of me and the plants are my paint palette. Since I use exclusively perennials in my garden (I buy annuals only for the planters), I find it useful to use a broad palette of foliage shades, shapes and textures. Especially in a shade garden (my front yard gets less than four hours of sun per day), this is very important. Often the flowers produced by shade plants are less dramatic than those from sun-loving plants. This doesn’t mean that a shade garden has to be boring. Think of the shapes available! Plants like fern, hosta, heuchera, ladies’ mantle, some day-lilies, creeping jenny, bleeding heart all have strikingly different foliage from each other and are great for shade or semi-shade. Heuchera (commonly known as ‘coral bells’) for example, comes in an enormous variety of colours. I have at least six different hybrids and that’s only the tip of the iceberg; there are at least 37 according to Wiki. Astilbe is another one that has a lot of hybrids. Many different coloured flowers and foliage is available, although they’ll produce more flowers with a bit more sun.
My favourite bed in the Tranquil Garden is the one under my lilac tree, which is a semi-shaded area. It gets enough sun to support day lilies, some irises, lavender, sweet william, etc, but mostly I’ve planted ferns, hostas, bleeding hearts, heuchera, astilbe, and forget-me-nots. The variety of the foliage and the splash of colour here and there is captivating. I get enormous pleasure from looking at that bed.
Forget-me-nots are real self-sowers, so you have to watch that, and do some dead-heading if you want to contain them. I love them so much that I have a hard time tearing them out, but that’s just me. There are plenty of others in the list above that don’t have that tendency, so your choices for a shade bed are quite extensive.
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