Elegance and color…in the shade

Flower & Garden Magazine, May, 1984 by Pamela Harper

Shade over your pleasure garden is not really a handicap.

In my own case, the shade garden gives me more pleasure for less work than the sunny garden. Not, however, if it is dry shade filled with tree roots. If you have that, it takes a regular mulching, watering, and digging out of tree roots to incude plants to thrive. The most promising shade gardens grow in beds shaded by north or east facing walls, in the dappled shadow of high branched deep rooted trees (pines, for example); an don the shaded side of large shrubs.

Now that perennials are returning to popularity, I keep seeing it said that they must have full sun or nearly so. This isn't true. There are as many kinds for shade as for sun.

Consider those we think of as wild flowers: Jack in the pulpit (Arisaema); Solomon's seal (Polygonatum); woodland phlox (Phlox divaricata); foam flower (tiarella); wild geraniums. Along with them are some from distant lands that can well migle with natives in light shade. Unless otherwise mentioned, all are hardy to Zone 5* (-20 degrees F.), and many northward of that.

In seasonal order, let's begin with Christmas-rose, Helleborus niger. It gets lots of publicity, perhaps because of its name. I cherish it, but it never flowers for Christmas here in Virginia, nor did it in England, my homeland. Often it lags behind the Lenten-rose which, for gardeners in Zone 6 and above, is a far better plant. H. orientalis hybrids usually start to flower here in February. From foot-high stems, several to a clump, nod flowers that are cup shaped at first, flattening to saucers later, averaging six per stem. Some are cream and green; some are pink-flushed and purple-flecked. Some buds are dark and dangle like little plums, and when they open the waxy translucent sepals become the showy part of the flower. Here in Zone 8 the leathery foot-wide fingered leaves are evergreen, although scorched and shabby in bad winters. They shade out weeds, but strangely not their own seedling which spring up by the thousands around a parent plant.

Back of these in dappled shade of pines is Helleborus lividus 'Corsicus,' fairly reliable in Zone 6 but uncertain farther north. This is taller. The two-foot stems are thick and almost trunklike, reclining under the weight of huge flower clusters, each with about 50 pale green flowers. As in all hellebores, the petal nectaries soon drop, but his does not detract from the beauty of flowers that remain in apparent bloom at least two months.

With Lenten-rose comes Adonis amurensis. Its flowers last only a week or two. The form I have, called 'FukujuKai,' has two rows of yellow petals to a flower rayed like a small single chrysanthemum, and varnished like a butter-cup. Flowers barely precede the ferny leaves, opening from buds that are yellow as they push through the soil.

Before Adonis is gone, lungwort flowers (Pulmonaria) show color. The pretiest kind of it I grow is 'Mrs. Moon.' In March the sprays of Salmon-pink flowers, fading to blue, glisten with whiskery stems, calyx and leaves. After flowers shrivel and disappear (spent stems should be removed) the gray dappled leaves at base grow out to a foot long, remaining ornamental and smothering weeds until late autumn. Lungworts are drought resistant, but they need shade; leaves wilt in sun. A similar plant is comfrey (Symphytum), which varies in size and sometimes in invasive. The commonest comfrey in the trade, a carpet-former with tubular creamy flowers opening from red buds, is often sold under the incorrect name of Pulmonaria lutea.

Along the same shaded path the perennial forget-me-not, Brunnera macrophylla, is then starting to produce sprays of tiny blue flowers above clumps of heart-shaped leaves that start out small but soon become much larger. Brunnera tolerates dry shade, and forms a colony by casting seeds out several feet, where seedlings flower the following year and themselves repeat the process.

A perennial plant with similar forget-me-not flowers that are a little larger and deeper blue is Omphalodes cappadocica. It is a creeping plant little more than six inches high, and although hardly known in this country, it is one of the very best perennials for dry shade.

As azalea time arrives, the creamy green bells begin to open on the arched stems of Japanese solomon's-seal. This plant bears several different names. Whether you order Polygonatum japonicum 'Variegatum,' P. falcatum 'Variegatum,' or P. odoratum. 'Thunbergii Variegatum,' you will get the same plant. Leaf tips and edges are lightly brushed with white. It does beautifully for me in dry shade under a water oak and is spreading in such a way as to suggest that it could be invasive if the going were easier. One could scarcely have too much of it, though.

Another Japanese plant of the lily family with equally beautiful variegated leaves, coming up at about the same time, is Disporum sessile 'Variegatum.' It is related to the North American merrybells (Uvularia) and looks like it, a foot tall, with white-striped lance-shaped leaves. There is also D. flavum, to two feet high with larger yellow bells resembling the large-flowered merrybells but not so drooping.