In areas like the Pacific Northwest that are blessed with an abundance of trees, one of the biggest challenges for gardeners is shade. While a lack of sunlight presents unique obstacles, a proper understanding of shade gardening can guide you towards the plants, design strategies, and practices that will help you establish a successful and beautiful landscape.
What Is a Shade Garden?
A shade garden is any setting that receives less than 3 hours of direct sunlight daily, while a partial shade garden will receive between 3 and 6 hours of light. The shade might result from trees overhead, or from buildings that block sunlight. Your whole garden might be encompassed by shade, or you might just have a bed or two that gets less light than other parts of the garden.
Because sunlight is the key to growth and flower production in plants, shade gardening should adopt a different perspective and expect slower growth with less of a focus on long-blooming flowers for interest. Shade gardens are best when they embrace lush foliage, textural plants, and allow flowers to act as brief exclamation points against a beautiful, tapestry backdrop.
The Main Plant Groups for PNW Shade Gardens
Diverse, interesting, and beautiful plants thrive in shade settings. Plants should be chosen as much for their foliage as for their flowers, and most shade-flowering plants bloom in the Winter and Spring when large trees are leafless and thus competition for light is less intense. Large leaves, feathery leaves, and even evergreen plants all thrive in shade settings. Here are some broad groups of plants that are perfectly adapted to shade gardens!
Hellebores
Flowering, evergreen perennial plants sport charming flowers in late Winter and early Spring and come in a range of colors from white to every shade of pink, and even amber and black. Learn more about Hellebores here!
Spring-Blooming Perennials
Columbine, Primula, Bleeding Hearts, Pulmonaria, and Violets are all woodland plants that flower before overhead trees leaf out and fill gardens with early-season interest.
Hostas
Large, spade-shaped leaves are gorgeous and come in a range of colors and textures, including matte grey curled leaves, large shiny chartreuse leaves, and leaves variegated in every tone of green.
Ferns
Feathery fronds may be evergreen or herbaceous, but no shade garden should be without the stunning textures that ferns bring, especially when woven amongst other types of shade plants.
Pacific Northwest Natives
Many sturdy and beautiful Pacific Northwest native plants are exceptionally well-adapted to understory shade, including Oregon Grape, Huckleberry, Salal and Wild Ginger.
Camellias
Evergreen shrubs are covered in large, eye-catching blooms in Winter or Spring, providing height and early-season color to shade gardens, all while attracting hummingbirds and other wildlife.
Hydrangeas
Massive heads comprised of many small flowers come in a range of colors and sizes and are particularly well-suited to wetter areas—Mophead and Smooth varieties are particularly good in shade. Learn more about Hydrangeas on our blog!
Rhododendrons & Azaleas
Iconic plants for Pacific Northwest shade gardens, these feature large clusters of jewel-like flowers in every color possible, and are very low-maintenance once established.
Japanese Maples
Delicate, lacy leaves on weeping or upright trees are prized for their multiple seasons of interest, with bright new growth, lovely fall colors, and a structure that looks great all year round. Discover some of our favorite Japanese Maples!
Tips for Designing Shade Gardens
Shade gardens are often most successful when they prioritize a cleaner, more restrained plant palette and planting scheme. A beautiful shade garden can be easily constructed from shades of green alone, making these spaces an ideal canvas for playing out a green-drenched garden. By mixing leaf sizes, tones, and textures, dynamic spaces can be created just from foliage plants.
While there are many beautiful flowering plants that thrive in shade gardens, expect them to flower for a shorter season than what you might see in sunnier locations. Here, they should be used to add excitement and energy to shade settings, while staying true to a consistent color palette and aesthetic. Check out our Shade Perennial Bloom Calendar for reference!
Lawn, or turfgrass, is difficult to grow in the shade, and so we tend to recommend lawn-free landscapes for shade gardens. Some of the best alternatives to lawns for shady gardens include water features, seating areas, or the use of large planting beds which can be planted in simple schemes to achieve a striking appearance from a distance or close up.
Shade gardens can be laid out in a naturalistic way, or in a more organized fashion. Inspiration, plant selections, and design examples for shade gardens that combine flowering plants with textural interest as a way to mimic a natural, woodland setting can be found in our Pacific Northwest Landscape Design Guide. And for gardeners that prefer a more consistent, linear style of gardening that allows textures and tones of foliage to shine, our Modern Landscape Design Guide is the perfect place to find the right plant selections for creating this look in sun or shade.
Guidance for Difficult Shade Garden Settings
Some types of shade present particular challenges for gardeners. Here are some of the more common tricky scenarios, all of which have their own blogs that detail plant selections and design solutions for difficult shade settings like shade with direct, intense afternoon sun, wet shade, dry shade, and deep, dark shade. While each shade situation has specific obstacles, choosing plants that are best suited to your environment is the key to creating a beautiful, happy garden.
- Wet Shade is found in areas with poor drainage, at the bottom of a slope, or around the edges of bogs, ponds, or streams. In wet shade, plant root growth is challenged by a lack of oxygen because soils go extended periods of time without drying out. LEARN MORE
- Dry Shade in the Pacific Northwest occurs primarily under conifers like Douglas Firs and deciduous trees like Maples. In dry shade, new plants must compete for water with the established trees. LEARN MORE
- Deep or Full Shade is classified as areas that receive less than three hours of direct, indirect, or dappled sunlight daily. A garden bed situated on the north side of a house or wall is considered deep shade. In deep shade, plants must be able to survive with very few opportunities to photosynthesize in the light. LEARN MORE
- Shade With Afternoon Sun can be found in west-facing areas between structures or trees where the direct light is blocked for most of the day but comes out for a window of time. In these settings, plants with large or delicate leaves risk being burnt by the intense rays of the direct, hot sun during Summer. LEARN MORE
Whether your garden is completely enveloped in shade or just has one tricky, shady bed, our at Dennis’ 7 Dees Garden Centers can help you find the perfect shade plants for your particular outdoor space. Visit our stores to find a wide selection of varieties of each of the excellent, garden-worthy plants in the lists above, available year-round. By mixing textures and hues of green, and inserting silvery or chartreuse foliage, you can create a shade garden that is dynamic, beautiful, and best of all, successful!