GARDENING How to add colour to shade
GOING COLOURFUL IS A WORTHY START TO LOOKING AFTER YOUR COOL SPOTS Your garden in summer is your ‘home away from home’. Adorn it with care.
Living moves outdoors this month and shady areas offer cool respite from day temperatures that will hit 30ºC. How do those shady areas look? Overgrown, too much green and not enough colour, neglected and in need of a facelift?
Shady areas generally require less attention than flower beds and the lawn closer to the house, but a quick make-over every now and then adds a new dimension to the garden, especially if it includes a bench or table and chairs for outdoor dining.
The easiest way to brighten up dull shade, is with coloured foliage plants that just keep on going. If everything seems to be in the same shade of green, here are five brilliant colour foliage plants that will add instant oomph.
Heuchera (Coral Bells) have dramatically coloured foliage, from lime-green, through pink, red, gold and silver, to almost black. Use them as a ground cover in areas that receive soft shade. A good idea is to plant three different colours together.
They need rich, well drained soil, fertilising once a year and trimming in spring. An easy to grow, low maintenance plant.
Coleus has always been the star of the foliage garden, with its vividly patterned leaves. Coleus Kong is a taller growing variety with huge leaves. It performs best and shows more intense colours in full shade.
Coleus Wizard is a more compact plant, with medium-sized leaves that performs better in semi-shade. It is a popular choice for gardens as a border, or edging plant. Both varieties do best in humus-rich soil that drains well and receives regular watering.
Alternanthera (Purple Prince) is a deep burgundy-leaved, perennial ground cover that adds a smoky depth to semi-shady areas.
It grows in ordinary garden soil, needs regular but not excessive watering, and compost in spring. Pinch the growing tips for a neat, mounded plant or leave it to spread and tidy up in spring.
Plectranthus is an indigenous shade plant that mostly flowers in autumn with purple, blue or pink flower spikes.
Plants range from tall bushes to spreading shrubs and vigorous ground covers.
Plants do best in moist, humus-rich soil. A very popular cultivar is Mona Lavender, a compact, shrubby plant that has dark-green leaves with a purple underside and spikes of lavender coloured flowers. Trim it after flowering.
Juncus (Blue Dart) grows in shade or sun and its spikey bluegreen foliage adds texture to a shady area. It likes consistently moist soil (ideal for a boggy area) and tolerates heavy soil. Once esThe tablished, the plants spread slowly by creeping rhizomes.
Flowers may not be as easy going as foliage plants, but they provide instant colour and energise bland areas. They can be replaced seasonally so that there is always something new to look forward to. Longer-lasting plants, like Begonia (Dragon Wings and Baby Wings) can be used as stand-out feature plants.
Begonias range from bedding begonias for the front of a bed to shrubby: Begonia Big and MegaWatt (that are like bedding begonias on steroids) to the hedge-like Wings. Begonias look as if they are water guzzlers, but that is misleading. Over-watering, rather than underwatering, tends to kill begonias.
They grow in ordinary garden soil that drains well and don’t like wet feet. They flower non-stop and don’t need deadheading.
They are easily the lowest maintenance flower for semishade. They also grow well in containers, which can be used as accents in a shady garden.
Impatiens is another shade stalwart, and from December onwards the disease-resistant New Guinea types are the ones to plant. Plants are bigger, with a wider spread than busy lizzies, so you need less of them.
They like rich, moist soil that drains well and they grow in shade to semi-shade. Some have differently coloured leaves that are as attractive as the flowers. The interspecific impatiens, Bounce, has the spread of bedding impatiens but the disease-resistance of the New Guinea’s. Another variety that is used for bedding colour is NG impatiens Divine, which has a good range of colours.
Fuchsia is an old favourite for light shade and its hanging flowers have the daintiness of tiny ballerinas. They bloom more or less continuously from summer to autumn and grow equally well in containers and in the ground. Their growth pattern varies from upright to trailing and semi-trailing; the latter two being ideal for containers and baskets.