the shade garden

But most of Saturday I spent working in my neglected shade garden.

Garden design, unless you are Frederick Law Olmstead, is about adapting to the conditions of a particular spot. But most of us do not have the ability to even think or imagine gardening in the broad expansive way that he did. So we adapt.

Beneath my massive sweetgum and maple, I started my shade garden about three years ago. This area is dry shade. So I began my making my first hosta bed out on the edge of the tree line, bending back to the fence between our lot and our neighbor's, and then hooking it back to the base of the sweetgum.

At random, this worked because

1) less roots to disturb
2) spaces that enclose can often invite the eye and the person to move into them. I am always looking for walkway or path areas, enclosures, again, ways to break the plane, providing obstructions or framing possibilities.
3) The previous winter I had not gotten the leaves in this area raked up in time before it snowed. The leaves had done a nice job of killing the grass there.

This fall, I finally decided that the dimensions were wrong, that the beds needed to be wider, and that instead of a big oval like enclosure around grass, that I could make a winding path, creating an island bed in the center.

I am about halfway through expanding and planting these news areas. Saturday, I worked a bit more on them, adding plants. But I also spent time with the first bed, and the first plantings there.

One conventional rule says hostas should be divided every three to four years. This is particularly true in a mass planting. I saw a stunning exception this spring, a seven year old Blue Angel cultivar that was allowed to become massive. It was a perfect focal point, contrasted with other shade plants of a finer, lacier texture. It deserved to be large and big.

My own plantain hostas have come out of a bed in my backyard. These are large green leaf hostas with a a big white flower that produce the biggest hosta flower I've ever seen. This weekend, I removed a couple to other spots and I moved a couple of other mounds of smaller leaf hostas out away from the plantains, as well as ferns that were getting squeezed out by the now large plantains.

I have a smaller leaf blue hosta that had become lost under my blue hostas. I moved it too. And I moved out a couple of yellow and green variegateds that had gotten lost, too.

In a mass planting, it is important that there are still distinctions between the different kinds of plants, so that it isn't just a messy blur.

The astilbes are in their bloom, a fanciful but sensible plant. Other than keeping them watered in the hottest months, and the keeping the neighbor's autumn clematis, a wild vine, off of them and on the fence, they require so very little.