LET THERE BE enlightenment
The shade garden can be one of the most rewarding retreats to cultivate. Here’s how to create your own
Shade gathers from year to year in the garden like the wrinkles on your face, growing more pronounced with time.
Small bushes develop into large shrubs, newly planted trees rise to the rooftops and beyond. Or as horticulturist Jenny Rose Carey says: “I love planting little trees and watching them grow.”
She has done this for 20 years in her 4.5-acre garden in a Philadelphia suburb.
“As you mature as a gardener, your trees grow along with you, and that’s a nice thing.”
So why are so many people down on shade? First, because they can’t grow roses or zinnias in the gloom, and for many, a garden must have floral colour to count. This is a limited view of the garden, where leaf forms, textures and plant architecture provide much more satisfaction, if only subconsciously.
But I’m with Carey in her belief that the shade garden is not just OK, and not just an asset when the heat is upon us, but is really the best part of the garden. Why?
Artfully planted and groomed, it is the most sheltered and cocooning place to be. The hallmark of the shade garden, she says, is its “intimacy,” which I take as its sense of privacy, of being placed in a serene environment away from the chaos of modern life.
Carey, who is director of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s public garden and nursery, Meadowbrook Farm, has written a book addressing the practical aspects of making and keeping a shade garden. It has an appropriately upbeat title, Glorious Shade (Timber Press, 2017). After reading her book and visiting her garden (and developing my own shade garden over more than two decades), I wrote a synthesis of Carey’s explorations and my own experiences.
FINDING YOUR SHADE
Shade is a moving target. The sun moves across the sky daily, and seasonally it shifts its duration, height and strength. In March, a tree offers scant shade; in June, it is a large, living parasol. In the space of five years, an area that is in baking sun can become shaded.
In hot climates, many plants do better with a little shade, relieved of the heat and stress of the sun’s rays, but in areas of deep, unremitting shade, the range of plants that will be happy narrows dramatically.
Carey deconstructs the catch-all label of “partial shade” into something more useful:
Edge shade is found at the boundary of woodland and provides the best of both worlds. Plants such as redbuds, dogwoods and azaleas thrive in such places.
Dappled shade is produced by trees with fine foliage or elevated canopies. Old tulip poplars and oaks are good examples of this. This is a heavenly place for all concerned — lots of light without the searing sunbeams.
Bright shade is found in dark areas that get a lot of reflected light from bodies of water, lightcoloured walls and windows.
Afternoon shade is found where the shading element is on the western side of things, morning shade when it’s to the east. Although, any area in uninterrupted afternoon sunlight is generally considered to be a sun garden.
The point is, you need to observe light and shade patterns in a given area at different times of day to gauge its shadiness.
THE BASICS OF A SHADE GARDEN
Turning a wooded lot into a sweet garden is not just a state of mind; it requires action.
Plot: Lots with trees tend to be neglected, and neglect leads to the arrival of heavy-duty weeds, particularly invasive vines.
“Start by chopping the top growth,” Carey writes in her book, “then dig up the roots.”
Then comes the sterling advice: They may re-sprout, so be vigilant.
You may also want to take down volunteer trees, even non-weedy ones, that have simply produced a thicket. This will open up space and light and make the remaining plants happier. Because she has the room and loves wildlife, Carey has allowed a few dead trees to remain as high stumps, and keeps them for birds as long as the trunks are structurally sound.
Mulch: Mulch retains soil moisture and discourages weeds. If you resort to importing bark or wood mulches, use finely shredded versions around smaller plants, and don’t put down a layer of more than five centimetres.
Plants: The best mulches are ground covers, which in turn form the basis of layered plant compositions. These strata include bulbs, perennials, spring ephemerals such as trilliums and Virginia bluebells, small-to-large shrubs, understory trees and, finally, the canopy trees providing the shade.
Planting in established woodland requires its own skill. You don’t want to smother tree roots with soil or chew them up with digging equipment. The key is to install young plants — perennials as plugs, for example — in the crevices between the tree roots. Carey likes to make a mixture of sand and leaf mould and, if there is room, work it into the planting hole. Small bulbs work well in the tight spaces between tree roots.
Watering: Irrigation systems can keep soil too wet and lead to the decline of many woodland plants, including big trees. Moreover, frequent shallow waterings encourage surface root systems that compromise plant resilience. Carey prefers occasional deep waterings to encourage roots to grow down. For new plants, she gives them a good drink once a week in their first growing season but is more stinting the next year.
Paths: Walking paths are vital elements; they keep feet from compacting plant roots and can fix problems with erosion. A layer of wood chips, replenished every year or so as it breaks down, will work in more naturalistic areas. But paths go way beyond utility; they establish the direction and character of the journey, which leads to the next point.
ELEMENTS OF DESIGN
A shade garden needs all the design elements of the larger garden. Consider how you might create all the important design features that make a garden beautiful and satisfying: portals, areas of transition from one space to another, focal points, framed views and, importantly, places to linger.
The last category is well served in Carey’s garden, which is full of spaces of repose, many of them infused with whimsy. This, in turn, is connected to Carey’s cultural DNA — she moved to the United States from her native England 30 years ago. English gardeners are not just notoriously passionate about horticulture but also eccentric with it.
This has produced such features as stumpery. A popular Victorian idea, this is a display of tree stumps and roots presented as a form of grotesque sculpture. One famous example is at Prince Charles’s garden at Highgrove. Carey says the exposed roots are useful to educate visitors about the hidden architecture of trees.
Every good peregrination through a new garden deserves a memorable ending, and Carey presents the né plus ultra of payoffs, a splendiferous garden shed she calls Rose Cottage. There is something inexplicably English about the role of the shed in the garden; like the shade garden itself, it is a blend of utility, artistic expression and cosy retreat.