Our backyard is made up of two distinctly different areas. The wet area under White Pines (the pines are on the property behind us ) will be discussed in a separate article and a quite dry area which is also shaded by two pines on our property as well as ones on the property behind us. As discussed in Part 1 of this series of articles, soaker hoses are a key to growing things in the dry shade under the pines on the north side of the property. While we are working at making the soil more moisture retentive by improving the organic matter content, the soaker hoses will likely be necessary for a long time to come. With their help though, many plants will grow in the conditions under the pines. The ‘dry side’ garden has quite a large collection of plants, although it’s going to take a few more years before it begins to look less bare under the trees.

The illustration below is my attempt to show the basic structure of the dry side of the garden (apologies for the quality of the illustration - it’s the best I can manage with a combination of hand drawings, Paint and scanner!)

The area shown is about 45’ wide and 25’ deep. The overlapping circles are the canopies of the two pines that are on our property. I’ve not shown the ones beside us to the north and behind us but all of the garden is under pine canopy….The path leading towards the garden shed goes to the compost heap behind the shed. We moved the compost heap there this spring; the path is through the former compost heap. I’ve planted mainly hydrangeas and a few other shrubs into the remains of the old compost heap and underplanted with Wild Ginger on the east side and Beacon Silver Lamium on the west side of the path. The shrubs along the back fence are rhododendrons and Pieris. Along the west side the shrubs are mainly False Spirea and a Peegee hydrangea. The large shrub at the front edge of the west pine is Summersweet. After I created this image, I’ve planted a ‘Diablo’ Ninebark behind and to the left of the Summersweet as this side of the garden needed more shrubs. There are a greater variety of shrubs under the easternmost pine as there is more sun there. The blueberry bed is quite small and predoninately highbush blueberries with a few lowbush (they need more acidity than I can really properly supply but the highbush are OK with less acid conditions…) There are also a couple of dwarf rhododendrons and lots of narcissuses in that bed. The Ash tree is a very large, mature tree, probably planted by the original owners of the house in the early 1960s. The oak looks like it’s maybe 15 years old or so. The portion of a circle on the right side of the picture represents the oak’s size at maturity. At the moment, you would not see the oak canopy in this view but I like to remind myself of it’s future impact.!

The composite photograph below shows the same area looking from about where the N arrow is on the diagram above, looking towards the shed, in early May 2001. The need for more shrubs is glaringly obvious! The path towards the shed in the diagram doesn’t exist in this picture and a number of the shrubs in the table below were planted after the picture below was taken. Eventually the neighbor’s garden shed will be less visible!



My attempt to take a composite picture didn’t work too well this year so the two sides of the center path are separate in the pictures below. The number and variety of perennials and spring bulbs is higher and things have filled in more this year but it’s still a few years away from maturing enough so that there is less bare ground! The table of plants above looks like a lot of plants but they need to cover a fair bit of territory




I’m a plantaholic! I’m a sucker for anything new or interesting! I’m warmly welcomed at my favorite garden centre because the owner knows I’m always going to buy lots of plants and she can usually sell me the less common things without too much difficulty! I try to keep a record of what I buy, where I plant it and how well it’s done. I’m not a meticulous record keeper though so I sometimes lose track and occasionally find surprises in the garden that I don’t remember planting. Some of the surprises appear on their own such as the odd leaves that appeared in one spot last year - they look like some kind or arum but no one who has seem them knows for sure what it is. They’re an interesting addition and don’t seem to be something invasive so we left them to see what happens. There were a few trilliums on the property when we arrived and we now have a thriving colony.

Hydrangeas are doing well here with the help of the soaker hoses on the dry side and they’re a great late-season color boost so I keep adding more. I don’t like the ‘mophead’ ball shaped ones or the blue or pink ones (which I think look better in a mixed perennial border than in a woodland) so my hydrangeas have been all white, paniculata types. This spring though, I’ve added a few lace-cap types to see if they’re really hardy here and one of them is blue. The blue one is likely to be the least hardy so we’ll see how it does…. I regret not planting a climbing hydrangea on the somewhat ugly garden shed. The long time to first flowering (up to 5 years) deterred me in 2000; if I had planted it then, it wouldn’t be too far away from flowering now. This spring I planted Schizophragma hydrangeoides 'Moonlight' as an alternative that’s supposed to grow a little bit quicker. 

Brunnera macrophylla is another of my favorite plants. It is covered in clouds of forget-me-not -like flowers in May and, after the flowers fade, the leaves keep getting bigger all summer until it looks something like a hosta by late summer. The type I have has silvery spots on the leaves and the leaves turn a purply-burgungy in the fall. ‘Minnow’ mini-daffodils together with grape hyacinths, blue anemones and white trilliums made a wonderful combination along the center path this spring. Japanese anemones add wonderful late summer color. Hardy cyclamens provide unexpected pretty pink flowers when they pop up in September. This year I planted some Dodecathon (Shooting Star) near them to add spring cyclamen-like flowers in the same area. Pieris japonica is doing better on my rhododendrom bank than the rhododendrons are! It has pretty, evergreen foliage and wonderful white lily-of-the-valley-like flowers in April and early May. Violets, violas, wild ginger and bunchberries make interesting groundcovers. The violets and violas seed themselves around in a charming manner and are easy to pull out if they go where they aren’t welcome (just avoid any rhizomatous types of violets….)

Perennial geraniums are an invaluable plant that I have growing along the outer edges of the woodland garden. I like blues and the bright magenta pinks. Some varieties have long bloom season and there are so many varieties out there with differing bloom times that you can find something that will bloom at whatever time you need it. I plan to add more geraniums after I take some time and sort out exactly when I need more flowers and then look for a variety that will flower at the right time. Woodland plants are primarily spring bloomer so summer color can be hard to find. Hydrangeas, Japanese Anemones and cimicifugas are an essential plant for late summer and fall color; geraniums are one of the best for mid summer color. In the sunnier spots, mallows and Sidalcea also provide some summer color.

Hellebores are also on my list of plants I need more of. I have the Christmas Rose and Lenten Rose types - my Christmas Rose started blooming March 19th this year and bloomed for about 6 weeks. The Lenten Rose started about 3 weeks later. I want some Helleborus foetidus to go with them. I just added a Corsican hellebore (Helleborus argutifolius) in May. My current hellebores are growing very well in a quite dry spot. I particularly like the evergreen foliage and the early flowers that appear just when you need a sign that winter really will end! I think I’m on my way to starting a hellebore collection…

The table below lists the plants I grow in the dry side of the garden. I’ve probably missed a few…. I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the hardiness ratings - they are from various Canadian garden catalogs so hopefully they aren’t too far off if any of them are wrong…. The comments column describes the relevant feature of the plant - i.e. the reason I wanted it in the garden, and/or growth habit. 

[1] Hardiness information may not be completely accurate - source is various garden catalogs.

A woodland garden is clearly a long-term project and I’m an impatient gardener so I’ll keep packing in more plants.  It’s a fascinating process though and gardening in shade is now, by far, my favorite type of gardening.  The garden on the other side of the shed is quite damp and is turning out to be easier to work with and things grow much faster.  The plants growing there are quite different and the subject of a separate article.