Planting for Moist Shade - Part 1

 Since my recent articles have concentrated on dry, rooty conditions, I thought we'd have a complete change of pace and I'd tell you about a garden I made for plants who like moist, shady conditions. Because I have a couple of "before" photos, I thought you might be interested in how this garden was built, as well as the plants that are growing in it.

 Once again, this page may be slow to load for some of you because of the photos - your patience is appreciated.

In The Beginning

 For many years, this part of the garden was an anomalous grouping of native trees and shrubs with some very unhappy Azaleas that my husband moved from his old house and stuck in holes in clay soil. Over the years, they diminished, instead of growing due to the bathtub effect caused by indifferent soil drainage. I halfheartedly stuck in various plants in a totally unsuccessful attempt to improve on things without actually doing what was necessary for this to happen.

 Matters were taken out of my hands in 1989 when we put an addition on to the house and had to have an electric heavy-up.

 This meant that I had to dig up everything in the path of the new underground electric service and, as you can see, the trenching for conduit left a huge mess. The bare, cinnamon colored vertical stems in the upper left of this photo belong to a Deutzia, about whom I will tell you more later. This photo was taken in early spring - you can see the poor daffodils blooming out of raw clay where they were dumped upon being dug up. The tree trunk at the left edge of the photo is the maple that dominates the border I told you about in "Planting Under Trees - Part 4".

 Rather than just replace the soil and the walk, I took this opportunity to make a bit of a focal point in this location.. Since I'm used to viewing things in plan, I spent some time up on our roof (there's a flat section that's easy to get to) looking down on this spot and conjuring. I hit upon the idea of making a perfectly circular garden to emphasize the curving walkways.

 The ground slopes from the drive to the walk about eighteen inches to two feet (0.45 - 0.60 m), although it really doesn't look like it in this photo. I decided to build a drystone wall to hold back the grade and pave the path that had developed over time as a short cut to the driveway. I set flagstone on bluestone dust for the walk, edged with stone sunk into the ground and built the steps by cutting back into the slope so that they were just slightly sloped toward the circle. I used brick set on edge with no mortar for the risers and flagstones set on stonedust for the treads. The tricky bit in doing this is making certain that every thing is snug and firmly set, with no rocking. This takes a fair amount of trial and error, but the bluestone dust helps a lot.

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