40 Plants for a DIVERSE LOW MAINTENANCE SHADE GARDEN

Well, happy spring! We are here in the front gardens and it's probably two weeks or so, a little more than two weeks since we shot our first kind of tour of the space, and you can see how much it's grown up just within those two weeks. When spring comes, it really does come, and I really wanted to concentrate on this shade garden, and for those of you who have been tuning into the videos for a while, you'll know that this is actually the first garden that we put in. What's interesting about this garden, the man who had had this place prior to us really wanted, even though he was a horticulturalist and he ran a plant nursery, in his own gardens he wanted them really low maintenance, which is really interesting because I think you could have a range of low maintenance gardens. So what he interpreted as like low maintenance for this garden was really just having three plants, and that was this Acer palmatum, which you see here, and then he had this spreading prostrate abies, that's right here, and then he had this weeping white pine, and those were the only three plants that were in this garden. I looked at my spreadsheet yesterday and there's over 160 different plant types that are growing in here now. Now not necessarily species, because we have lots of different types of cultivars, so for example this is a tiarella, and we have the native tiarella, the tiarella cordifolia, the straight species, but there's also so many great cultivars as well. I probably have about half a dozen different cultivars, but they have interesting patterns on their leaves, and you see they have this kind of maple-esque or acer-shaped leaf right here, and sometimes those have a bit more red in the venation, for example. This one over here I had recently gotten, and this is a cultivar called cutting edge, so you could see that it has a bit more lobes around its leaf, but really when I was thinking about this garden, I wanted to pay homage to what was already planted in here, and these are three real statement pieces, the tree, the abies, and the red-leaved Japanese maple. I wanted to go with more reddish purplish tones, so that's what you're seeing in here with some of the leaves and some of the flowers that are coming up, but also this is really a shade garden, and some folks may say, oh you can't grow much in shade, but this just proves a point that you can. So what I'd like to do is show that one, the various different plants, and I'll highlight not all 160 of them, but I'll highlight quite a number of them that you could plant in a shade garden, some of them native, some of them not, and also that this is actually a low-maintenance garden, so you could have a really diverse low-maintenance garden and not just featuring trees. Now one of the things that is a benefit to that is like a lot of trees do provide a wildlife benefit, you know, oftentimes if you have flowers, you'll have insects will come to the trees for the flowers. If you have trees like this, sometimes birds will put nests in them, but there's a lot of value that herbaceous plants can also have, and herbaceous plants, particularly ground covers, which is most of what I have here would be considered a ground cover, will prevent any type of weed pressure, and to me when you have a lot of ground covers and you you start to fill in those layers, that to me is a low-maintenance garden, because I probably spend all but maybe five or ten minutes weeding some errant weeds in this shade garden, and to me that's the perfect low-maintenance garden, a really heavily diverse beautiful full garden that fills in all the gaps between trees like this, so they have the canopy, you have a sub canopy, and you have this beautiful herbaceous layer. So let's just go through some of them, I think one some of the ones that you might see right away that I planted along this border, this is a type of geranium. Now this is not our native geranium, and oftentimes when I don't plant something that's native, I will make sure that we have our native plant species as well, but this is geranium samabor, and I love the red and purple splotching on these leaves, and again because of the Acer palmatum with the Acer or maple-like leaves, I wanted to get plants in here that kind of mimic that maple-like leaves, and luckily a lot of understory shade grown plants have that maple-like leaf, which is pretty cool. Now then I have some of our native geranium, and if you want to see, I'm going to take you over here in our hydrangea or shrubbery, I call it the hydrangea garden or shrubbery garden, some of these lilac pink ones right here that are just coming up. So these are planted as plugs almost one and a half years ago now, and they are now fully flowering and coming up, which is really nice to see because oftentimes when you plant plugs, depending on the plant, it takes a little while for them to establish. It's not like they're flowering right away. So I made sure to plant probably 60 or so of those, and they make a really nice ground cover. And I know when some people think of ground cover, they think maybe like really short, one to three inch, one to six inches, but ground cover could also be quite high, and geranium is an example of that. 18 to 24 inches, so that's around a little over one and a half to two feet tall. And what I like to do in this garden in particular is after these flower, I'll cut them back. So I'll cut the stalk back, and it starts to look really tidy again. So I don't mind when it's flowering. It gives a little pollinator resource to our pollinators, especially when the sun starts coming out today like it is right now. And then once they start to tip over a little bit, I just kind of chop them off. Now again, where like higher? Yeah, I'll usually chop them off like right here. Because they do get kind of tall, so they're almost at their peak flowering stage. This is their peak height, and they still got a lot of flowers coming, you can see. I mean they're really floriferous, and the color I think is just spot on. That kind of purplish red, I think it matches with the Acer palmatum really nicely. Now some of those other maple leaf varieties, and this is some of our native ones, I also planted Heuchera. And one of the studies I had referred to in some of my earlier videos here that you may have seen is that I had read a report from Mount Cuba Center out of Delaware, and they found that there are specific specialist pollinators that go to particular plants and need that plant in order to be able to fulfill its life cycle. And Heuchera americana, which is our native Heuchera, is a plant. And so I went and got a number of Heuchera americana. There's also Heuchera pochella here, and a number of other straight species. But I was interested in being able to support specialist pollinators. Now whether that specialist pollinator exists here, we don't know. I don't have like a team of entomologists here looking at all the bees. I'm not spending my time looking at the bees, even though I'd like to spend more of my time doing that. But there's like work to do here, and until I get that time I'm not going to be able to do that. But here I am just trying to plant those plants. And if you're interested in hearing more about specialist pollinators, I would encourage you to listen to some of the videos that I've done on that, and I'll link to them here. Now another great native plant that is considered relatively rare in New York State is this one. It looks like two lungs, doesn't it? I bet that's, uh, they're probably using the doctrine of signatures to say, oh this might be a lung medicine, but I don't know from an herbalist standpoint. But this is Jeffersonia diphylla, diphylla, two leaves. And I had planted up some of this, but then one of our friends had come over who's doing some earthwork around their house, and unfortunately they have a lot of, I mean fortunately, they have a lot of Trillium and Jeffersonia and a number of others, Waterleaf, and they had to do some of that earthwork. And so I was able to scoop out a few and actually put some more in here. So I had one that was seed grown that I picked up at the Native Plant Society plant sale, and then this clump I actually just planted in here because I still have space. Even with all these plants, I still have space. Yeah, and his garden was in the forest. And his, yeah, he basically... Which is shade, garden, perfect, basically. And you could do so much with that. So I was a little sad when he was saying I want to do some earthwork, but you know, to each his own. Then we have Trillium. This is another native Trillium. We have, this is Raycurvatum, but I have Trillium erectum. And that pink one over there, which is kind of past its prime flowering, that's Trillium grandiflorum. And it starts white, and then I think when it's fully pollinated, it goes to pink. So that's its way of like senescing or maybe sharing with pollinators that like, hey, I'm done for the time being here. Here's another one. This is interesting. So I mentioned Tiarella, and I mentioned Heuchera, but I didn't mention Heucherella. Now this is an example of an intergeneric cross. Intergeneric means like two genera, two genus, like a genus. So Heuchera and Tiarella combined, and that has created this Heucherella. I don't know if it's sterile or not, but it gets kind of foamy bell-like flowers, very similar to Heuchera and Tiarella. This one is a non-native but a great spreader, and this is called Gallium odorata. Now I've been to garden tours where people plant this and they say they abhor it afterwards because it takes over so much. They say that they, you know, can never plant another plant. I think that's true if that's the only plant that you planted in the herbaceous layer. But if you plant it in with a diversity of other ground covers, then it's just going to weave through the rest of the ground covers. And I think that's the key is planting a bunch at once. And it's not like I started with a ton of plants. I planted a lot of Cornus canadensis, which is in here. I'll try to find it for you. It's just starting to come up because I know that was one of the plants that I had wanted, but I wanted to also introduce a lot of others. And so pretty soon afterwards I started to bring in more plants throughout the season. A great one actually that is native that you wouldn't expect. So when we think of Sedums and Sempervivums, you don't think of those as one, shade garden plants, or two, ones that are actually native to your environment because a lot of those have been brought from like Europe or the Mediterranean or different places. This one is now in flower and this is called Sedum turnatum right here. And it's got this fleshy succulent leaf. And it's our stone crop. It's one that tends to grow on stones or in kind of rocky, not a lot of soil conditions in the forest. In the shade, believe it or not. Or like in dappled light, which is pretty cool. Here's an example of that tiarella here, another one. And look at how cute those little like kind of cleaning brushes look like, the little pink tips. Now this one right here, I don't have a lot of this, this is the only one I have growing here, is one of our May apples, Podophyllums. And this is our native May apple. And this grows native in our forest as well. I don't think deer browse this because it's quite prolific in our forest still. So I figured this one would also be a nice one that I could plant within it. Speaking of deer, what would happen to this garden if you let deer have it? Well, I have to say that there are some plants in here that the deer would absolutely adore, like the Trillium that I mentioned. I think they would eat the Jeffersonia as well. But a lot of these I don't think they would touch. Like a great example of a native plant is this chordate-shaped heartleaf one right here that is really filling out quite nicely, because I only had a small bit of that. That is our native ginger. Not ginger in the way that you would eat it, but it kind of has a root that smells a bit like that kind of gingery root. And that's our Asarum canadens. And that is one that the deer won't touch. And it's one I'm probably going to plant down by the stumpery that I shared with you, because I want to find more of our native plants that our deer won't eat. We also have like trout lilies. They're throniums that are planted in here somewhere. I don't know where, if I could find them. But those also do not seem to be eaten by deer. And sometimes you just have to walk into your own forest or a forest around your area that's not fenced in, and you see what native plants are growing. And it's probably ones that are unpalatable to deer. But yeah, they would probably eat the tops off the Trillium, which doesn't necessarily kill the Trillium, but it doesn't make them stronger either. So that's a Trillium. This is another one coming up right there. You can see three leaves, three sepals, three petals. Now let's see where else I could go here. This is funny because this is coming up, and I can't remember what this is. And it's got, it's got a really well-defined leaf. So I'll have to get back to you on that. This is interesting though. Like if we come here, so I have, this could be either a Vaccinium or, yes, this might be a Vaccinium. And I think this is an Arctostaphylos, which is the Kinnikinnik vine or Bearberry. So that's coming in there, but that's spreading a lot less quicker than I imagined. Now this one right here is a non-native, but it's spreading very nicely. And this is an Aruncus. I have a Steel Bay and I have Aruncus that are in here, but these are goat's beards. They're quite small because, again, some of these could grow quite tall. You have goat's beards and you have the Steel Bays that grow really large, but I wanted to keep this quite small. The larger plants I have in the back, this one is an Actia, and this could get a very tall, wispy, white spire that sticks up and is like a pollinator magnet for sure. You could see that this area has been dug out a bit and I had planted here at some point, but this is where the Groundhog and the Chipmunks kind of make their way through the garden. So you just have to kind of go with it. Now what's interesting about this is that I'll show some videos from the past, but I had planted this in two parts. This part I had planted first and then Sondra had suggested actually extending it because when this pathway had been put in, the pathway cut under this tree, because you could imagine when they planted this tree 30 years ago, it was a lot smaller. Yeah, you could walk right here. Yeah. But now that it's grown this big. We might have to extend the path even more. We'll have the same problem in 20 years. We'll have the same problem, yeah, 20 years. We'll have to move the house too. Yeah, so you know, typically would you plant this close to your house with trees? You know, maybe not, but you know, they did and it's something that we have to go with. But you could see that I had planted this section first, which was really dense. Last year when we were showing the shade garden, that section that I just showed you wasn't really that dense. And now you could see the density kind of trailing over there. I didn't plant any gallium odorata, which is that white flowering plant, and it's starting to spread over there very nicely. So let's see what else I could share with you here. Oh, the claytonia, it won't open up its face until it's sunny out. But this is claytonia virginiana, which is our native spring beauty. I'll show you shots of it when it's fully open. And this is also a specialist pollinator plant. So I've got a bunch of seeds of claytonia and I just kind of spread them in here and I noticed a bunch of them actually came up this year, which is awesome. So there is a specialist pollinator for claytonia and a specialist bee. And I wanted to make sure that we actually had that. And I also put it in our hydrangea garden. So a very nice dainty understated flower that's kind of white with like little pink pinstripes throughout. You'll see you have sedges here. There's a lot of wonderful sedges that grow in the forest. And I was just walking in the forest maybe two weeks ago to see what was coming up, see some of our trillium out there. And there's some beautiful little woodland sedges. They almost look like grass. This one has a much more like almost firework display of as a carix. So and then this one is also another one. It has that kind of a bit more plantain shaped leaves. Oh, here is the cornus canadensis. It's really hard to see, but here it is just coming up right now. So this is one of the first plants that I had planted there. And you can see it's kind of getting gobbled up with all the other plants, but they play nicely with one another. And we have some ferns that are coming up. I can't tell you which one this was that I planted. And here looks like a columbine. So that's another one. So we have some really native columbine called aquilegia canadensis. And there's one that is planted in here that is a cultivated variety of that called corbet, which has a white flower. Normally our aquilegia canadensis, which does flower right around now, has a red and yellow flower, which we have some growing down in our another garden down below. What's this one with the red edge? Whoa, what is that? It's poking through the leaf. This could actually be... No, this one. Yeah, this is the same one. Might be a multiflora rose. It might be a multiflora rose that got in there. There's one a little bit of maintenance. Yeah. Well, you see actually some grasses in here. So I said this is almost a low maintenance, almost, because I do have some grasses. I spent about five minutes. I could see some things in here now that I'm looking. Here, this is a honeysuckle. So what happens is sometimes a bird will sit up above and poop out like a honeysuckle berry, and then it just germinates here. But the amount of weeds that you get in here is very, very little. As you can see, I'm pointing out a lot of things. But I do see some grasses kind of growing up in here with the sedges. There's some bare spots, but the amount of effort you have to do is very minimal. Here's one that I forgot to mention. So this is a strawberry. You can see a little strawberry. And this is a cultivated variety called, I think, golden alexandria. But it's like an arctic strawberry. It does get a little strawberry on it, but not as prolific as some of the cultivated strawberries that you would see. Here's another little honeysuckle. I could tell they're leaves. And would they eventually take over if you don't take them out? Oh, yeah. I think like they would start, but, you know, it doesn't take them. They're not as prolific. But they're almost easier to pluck out than a weed. Or like a grass. Grass gets very, a lot of times, like, especially if it's a rhizomatous grass, it gets kind of like thatchy. And then you pull out a big chunk of soil with it. But this is relatively easy, especially when they're this young. This is an interesting one. This is gultheria procumbens. So this is our wintergreen. One of our wintergreens. So I see that's coming in. Not heavily prolific, but. And I have other ones in here, like cardamom diphylla, which is our toothwort. I don't know where that is right now. There are some early ones that really came out, like the, see if I could find one still under here, under the skirt. When this doesn't have its leaves on it, we could really see underneath. But now we can't. But I have some Japanese painted ferns under here, and you could see, if you could pick that up. This is our bloodroot. I have lots of trillium hiding under here. So that's another one. So that's, even that's enough light for them? That's enough light for them. Because a lot of these plants are. That's very shaded. But two weeks ago. Two weeks ago it wasn't. We didn't have any leaves on this, and that's when the bloodroot was actually flowering. So you have these that are kind of called spring ephemerals. They are not, not kind of called. They are called spring ephemerals. And it means that they come up really early in the spring before everything starts to leaf out. And then they do their flowering, and then the rest of the time they have their leaves on them. So I should show you back here. This is, was at some point called dicentra. This is our bleeding hearts. And this is one that I remember from basically my great-grandmother's house. I always loved looking at the bleeding hearts. I mean every kid loves a shape like that. And this has become extremely prolific, right? I planted this. This was a little stick. Yeah. Because I remember working on the siding here. And there was this tiny little plant, and now it just exploded. Yeah. And then underneath we have heliobores, which you can't see anymore. There's some more that's planted around here. But I'll have to show you those in a close-up. They're still under here. They're like in the understory of that. And then let's see what else I have here. More heliobores that aren't blooming. This is a very short form. I had mentioned this before. It's starting to get these curly leaves, so I wonder if some type of disease had hit it. But this is one of our native viburnums. It does not stop it from flowering though. So you see the flowers are going to be coming up. Another one of our acolegias. We also have a rue in here. This is, I'm like wondering what this flower is. You can see the flowers coming up right around right around here. So I'm interested. Sometimes I forget even what I've planted in here. It's so diverse. Look at these little flowers with the green dot on them. Yeah. So those are our leucogyms, and those aren't native, but they are very early spring bulbs and one of the ones that blooms excessively early. So these were blooming back in April when not everything was really blooming in here. The gallium and the tiarella just started blooming I would say a few days ago. So the geraniums just about a week ago. So those are well in advance and do provide a nice bit of food for our early pollinators. So we didn't see no weeds in here because as Sondra had pointed out, there's a multi-floor rose that I have to come in there and take out and some of these little honeysuckles and a grass here and here too. But the point is that there is one, many different ways to look at a low maintenance garden and you could have an extremely diverse low maintenance garden. And two, you could also have a great garden for the shade. Now you can see that there's some sun coming in. It will need some bit of sun or dappled sun, but for the most part, this is under shade for the rest of the day. It's shaded by the house. It only gets some of this eastern light in the morning and then it's pretty much done for the day. That's all the light it gets. But look at the life that you could have. And even if it's not in flower, I find it to be really beautiful because you get so many different textures, colors, and shapes within the leaves. And you know, even if you went with like three or four different varieties, you could have an excellent garden. You don't need to get 160 different varieties in here, but I like to kind of push it in my gardens. I like to focus on a lot of diversity. I like to emphasize native plantings, but I don't want to shy away from other cool plants that we've never had in our garden before either. So that's my scoop on the low maintenance shade garden here, and I hope that you've got to enjoy it with me and also learn about some new plants that you can maybe incorporate in your garden as well. We'll be sharing how the gardens and wildscaped areas mature as the seasons progress, so if you enjoy videos like this, be sure to like, subscribe, and hit the notifications button to help us grow and share these videos to more folks. In the meantime, we'll be cracking away at more of the gardens and renovations here at Flock. We'll see you in the next video.