Is shade gardening easier than sun gardening?   I think it is… but I guess it depends on what sort of shade garden you have.   That’s not to say that I think shade gardening is easy.   It still takes planning and arranging and tending and rearranging.  Soil still has to fit the plants.  Mulch needs to be applied.   But our experience with a shade garden is that it only needs work in the Spring and Fall.   And even then we don’t seem to put as much effort into that space as we would a comparable space with the same number of plants.  Our shade garden is usually FULL of plants.  

Most shade gardens, ours included, are heavy with ferns and hostas.   That’s partly because they’re readily available, easy to grow and come in a very wide variety of shapes, colors and patterns.  You can mix several varieties of ferns and hostas into one grouping and get a very pleasing ensemble – as much so as if you had planted different kinds of plants altogether. 

But there are all sorts of shade garden plants.  Dead nettle, bleeding heart, astilbe, lenten roses, lily of the valley, soloman’s seal, lungwort.  Not to mention larger plants that do well in understory like hydrangea and rhododendron.   Except for the rhododendron, we have all of these in just one of our shade gardens.   The list of possible plants is long. 

Every couple of years some plants need thinning or dividing.  But even that doesn’t seem to come as quickly as it does with our sun plants.  Maybe that’s because up until recently our sun plants have greatly outnumbered our shade plants, but I don’t think so. 

What do you think?   Is shade gardening easier than sun gardening?   Use the comment link below to state your thoughts.

Filed under: Shade Gardens