Maximize the shade: Plant shade loving plants

Many shade-and-moisture-loving plants flower early in spring when sun and moisture are plentiful. This is because in nature, rain is typically abundant in late winter and spring, but conditions dry radically as summer begins.

And dwindling rainfall isn't the only change. Trees clothed with leaves block out light while simultaneously absorbing a great deal of moisture from the soil. The result is that places that are moist and partially shaded in early spring become shadier and drier as the season progresses. It is easy to create a woodland garden that is lush with greenery and flowers in spring. However, the same places where blue woodland phlox, trilliums, and miniature daffodils flower in spring may look barren by midsummer without heat-tolerant recruits.

Try these shade-loving options to fill those barren spots:

• You can count on spreading foliage perennials like hostas and ferns to emerge in late spring in time to hide the yellowing foliage of spring bulbs as they begin to go dormant, and you can be sure that the hostas and ferns will maintain their good looks throughout the rest of the growing season.
• Heucheras are also valuable for this purpose, along with short, shade-loving grasses, such as golden hakone grass.
• Do plan to provide supplemental water to your shade garden should a drought cut off its natural water supply.
• Although hostas, hellebores, and other shade-loving perennial plants are surprisingly drought tolerant, weather is always unpredictable, and is sometimes inhospitable.
• Droughts can last for several weeks, and can even come in the spring, when rain is usually adequate.
• Because this particular gardening niche depends on ample water in spring, strategic watering with sprinklers or soaker hoses during spring droughts can ensure its health and resilience through the rest of the season.

A woodland carpeted with wildflowers in spring is an unforgettable sight. Rich, moist soil coupled with dappled shade can foster not only native woodland treasures but also shade-loving plants from around the world.

Your options

Woodlands and forests in Europe, Japan, and China have given us some of the most beautiful plants we can grow in our shady, moist gardens.

A cluster of small trees can offer a protective canopy for your treasures, and even a single tree can allow you to grow a few shade-loving plants.

Or tuck woodland beauties like Solomon's seal, forget-me-not, and bleeding heart into soil along the east side of your house, where morning sun is plentiful but there is protection from scorching afternoon sun.

Better still, install an arbour or pergola and plant your shade plants beneath it, where they will be sheltered from the midday sun.

The following also do well in moist shade: asarum, astilbe, azalea, begonia, bergenia, bleeding heart, blue star, bugleweed, caladium, camellia, campanula, cohosh, coleus, columbine, dead nettle, dogwood, Dutchman's pipe, fern, forget-me-not, foxglove, garden phlox, goatsbeard, golden hakone grass, heuchera, Japanese anemone, lungwort, mahonia, meadow rue, mountain laurel, primrose, red buckeye, red-osier dogwood, silverbell, snowbell, summersweet, turtlehead, viburnum, winterberry holly.

Whatever your choice is, filling the bare spots will enable you to create a full and lush landscape in those hard-to-fill areas of almost any yard.