The Tropical Shade Garden
© Paul The Wise Gardener!
This process takes about 7 years to really reap many significant rewards for the gardener who attempts this project, but I feel that it's well worth the wait!
What you first must do is plant a venerable slow to medium-growing tree like a Live Oak (Quercus virginiana), which becomes the "keystone" for your future shade garden! Palms just don't have the potential for casting an abundance of shade, as does an oak, and fast-growing trees in this "neck of no woods!" are too much of a liability during Hurricane Season! THey crack, split, and tumble easily...all over your understorey plants that you've worked so hard to establish!
Under an oak, however, you can establish the following: tropical gingers, all sorts of ferns, including Australian Tree Fern, tropical understorey palms like pinangas, and licualas, and anthuriums & bromeliads for great "splashes" of colour, even in shady areas.
My main reason for attempting a shade garden, here in South Florida, was quite simple: 'tis way too hot & way too much SUN here! As much as we love the sun, in Florida, we NEED an escape from those unrelenting rays of UV! It literally is about 25 degrees cooler under our massive 25 foot high Live Oak! There are on various branches, an abundance of hanging baskets, wind-chimes, left-over Christmas ornaments, prisms, and many, many birds, that visit THEIR birdbath daily...to cool off, too! They let us watch them bathe right outside our kitchen window!
Yes, friends, we have a cool, shady habitat right outside our East-facing window, with many shapes and colours, that let's us forget that it's STILL 100 degrees outside the door! This IS QUINTESSENTIAL LIFE...this IS our shade garden! Try one, they are simply great!
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