Understanding Shade in the Garden

When choosing plants for the garden, the words shade-tolerant, or grows in shade are regularly seen. The true situation with shade is a little more complicated than that, and a better understanding of the various kinds of shade found in gardens is helpful in making good choices, and avoiding costly failures. Let’s think about the different kinds of shade, and their impacts on the growth of plants.

The Different Kinds of Garden Shade

• Shade from Buildings – supports a wide range of plants
• Shade from Deciduous Trees – easier place to grow many plants
• Shade from Evergreens – too dense and permanent for most plants
• Deep, Dry Shade – hard for almost all plants to survive in

Shade from Buildings

This kind of shade is the most forgiving, and the easiest to find plants for. A wide range of plants will grow well in areas shaded for all or part of the day by a shadow from a house or taller building. The primary reason for this is that the sky overhead is not obstructed, so plants still receive a full spectrum of light, containing all the wavelengths needed for growth. The only difference is that the light is less intense, so some plants will grow more slowly, or with more open growth and fewer leaves, as they adapt themselves to the lower light levels.

When looking at the areas in your garden that are shaded by buildings, it is important to look at the right time of year. The critical periods for most plants are equinox to equinox – March 21 to September 21. This is the growing and flowering season, and shade when they are dormant, and probably with no leaves, is not very important. As the year progresses to the mid-summer solstice, the sun rises higher in the sky each day. The length of a shadow at noon becomes shorter and shorter. So if you can, notice where the shade reaches to around one or other of those dates – it will be the same for both. Anywhere inside that area should be considered partially-shaded, although in June some of it will be in full-sun. Any plant that needs sun or partial shade will thrive in that zone.

Shade from Deciduous Trees

For many gardeners, these areas have a lot to offer, particularly in the trees are mature, with high branches, and spaced widely apart. Although you will need to do some good soil preparation, and attend to watering in the summer, with that done you can grow a wide range of shade-loving plants. From Japanese maples to camellias, and including all the different rhododendrons and azaleas, many shrubs and smaller trees that naturally grow beneath larger trees will love this area. Because the big trees leaf-out a little later, there is a sunny window of opportunity for short-lived spring plants, and early-blooming shrubs, to flower and grow before the full shade of summer arrives.

The shade from deciduous trees has been filtered – some of the wavelengths needed for plant growth has already been removed when passing through the leaves. This gives the light that magical ‘woodland’ quality, but it does make it harder for plants not adapted to woodlands to survive. Because of that, plants chosen for these areas need to be shade-loving, or enjoy dappled shade, and while many sun-loving plants will survive in building shade, they usually won’t in the shade beneath trees.

Shade from Evergreens

Evergreens, like Spruce, Fir, or large evergreen trees like southern magnolia, all present gardeners with more problems. Because they throw shade all year, that spring window of opportunity is gone, and the shade itself is often much denser, making the light-levels very low. Some evergreens, particularly most pine trees, do cast much lighter shade, and many plants that grow beneath deciduous trees will also grow beneath pines. They are much more ‘garden friendly’ than most other evergreens.

If the evergreens are some distance away, so that the garden area is open to the sky above, then it will be much the same as building shade, and allow a broad range of plants to grow. It is when the area is directly underneath the branches that problems arise. Some plants, like Japanese holly, Oregon grape, cherry laurel and sacred bamboo will grow in these locations, and are some of the best choices to go directly underneath those evergreen trees. Plants need to be described as grows in full shade to do well

The best approach is to keep evergreens with their branches right to the ground for as long as possible. Plant them where you won’t need to trim them up for access, and trim some of the upper branches so the lower ones stay alive. That way you won’t have the problem of planting beneath them to deal with at all.

Deep, Dry Shade

Here we are talking about those areas where thickly branched evergreens come down to within a few feet of the ground, yet the soil beneath is bare of anything green. Because of the overhead coverage, a lot of rain never even reaches the ground, so the area is both dry and dark. This is the hardest location to successfully plant, particularly if you cannot keep a steady supply of water coming. The best choices are periwinkle, big-root geranium and Japanese spurge, planted in big groups to fill the spaces, especially close around the tree trunks. Further out you will be more successful with a wider range of plants. Some gardeners just screen the area off with some taller shrubs planted further away, and hide the gap altogether.

 

You may think you have a shady garden, where not much will grow. Now you can go out and analyze that shade more carefully, taking note of what kinds you have. With that knowledge, you can make good choices of plants, and you will probably find you have a lot more options that you thought. A lot of very attractive plants grow best in certain kinds of shade, and without it our gardens would not be so varied and beautiful.

Fir Trees – An Attractive Alternative to Spruce

In colder areas, spruce trees are a common sight, and they are widely used in landscaping. Despite their beauty, the fact that they are so widely used can make them slightly boring options. Their value as screens or specimens can certainly not be underestimated, but sometimes we yearn for something different. If you are looking for a hardy, attractive specimen evergreen for a lawn, or something tough to make a privacy screen or wind-break, and spruce leaves you cold, consider the fir trees, a group that contains some magnificent evergreens every bit as useful as the common spruce.

Get to know Fir Trees

Fir trees are conifers – needle trees that are almost all evergreen. They can be found all around the Northern Hemisphere, usually in colder areas, and on mountain slopes. They typically have a strong central trunk, with branches radiating out all around the trunk, and many can potentially grow to great heights, well over 100 feet tall. Since it takes many decades to reach such heights, in practice in gardens they are often much smaller than in the wild, and many selected garden forms stay usefully small enough to fit medium-sized gardens.

It can sometimes be difficult at first glance to distinguish fir trees from other similar conifers – like spruce trees. If the tree you see has cones on it, then the task is made very easy indeed. Fir trees are unique in having cones that sit upright on the branches, not hanging as they do in all other similar trees. They sit proudly upright, even when they are large, sometimes 6 or 8 inches long. They are also often attractive colors – green, brown, purple or blue. As well, behave differently when they ripen. Instead of falling to the ground intact, they break up on the tree into flat, scaly seeds, which blow away in the wind.

If there are no cones, it is still pretty easy to decide, ‘Ah, fir tree.’ Take a look at the needles on the stems. In fir trees they are always flattened, not round, and they usually end in a notch, not a point. They are also commonly, but not always, arranged in two rows along both sides of the stem, in the manner of a double-sided comb. Even if that is not very obvious, the lower needles often curve upwards, so that they do not radiate out uniformly around the stem. Looking for these things will usually give you a good idea if a certain tree is a fir.

Fir Trees for the Garden

There are around 50 species of fir trees, but only a handful are commonly found in gardens, and many of the species differ only in ways a botanist would find interesting. They are grouped together based on where they come from, with an important group from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, another from North America and Asia, and another from the western USA, Mexico, and in mountains into Central America. Let us look at some of the more interesting ones for gardens.

Balsam Fir

This tree, called Abies balsamea, is the work horse in the group, and it is sadly overplanted as a rather dull, dark-green screening plant. As a garden feature we can quickly pass it by, even though if you want a tough, cold-resistant screening tree, and don’t care much about appearance, it certainly fits the bill.

Spanish Fir

This tree tells a very different story to the Balsam Fir. Coming from southern Spain and northern Morocco, this handsome tree, Abies pinsapo, has been developed for gardens into several different attractive forms. It rapidly grows into a beautiful, densely-clothed upright tree of perfect conical form. Older trees have large cones of a rich purple color, and best of all, there is an award-winning blue form, ‘Glauca’, called the Blue Spanish Fir.  It is hardy from zone 6 south, and is far superior in every way to the common Blue Spruce. Its rich blue foliage must be seen to be believed, and the tree will stay clothed to the ground in a full circle of branches for decades. If you have a good-sized lawn needing a specimen tree, you cannot go wrong with this selection.

If blue is not your thing, then consider the golden form of this tree, the Golden Spanish Fir, Abies pinsapo ‘Aurea’. Unlike most other conifers with golden foliage, this tree holds it golden color all year, never turning green, which makes it very special. It is also much smaller than the blue form, only reaching 15 feet, or eventually 25 feet in height. If you have a smaller space to fill, give this one some serious thought.

Korean Fir

From a different group of fir trees from Asia, the Korean Fir, Abies koreana, stands out. This one is much hardier, all the way into Zone 4, and it revels in snow and cold winters. It has the added benefit of also growing well in partial shade, unlike almost all other conifers, so it is very versatile around the garden. An outstanding smaller form is the Silver Curls Korean Fir, with the tongue-twisting name of ‘Horstmann’s Silberlocke’, which is one of the richest blue conifers available. It is also special among firs for producing its purple cones from a very early age, when just 3 or 4 years old. So even a very young tree will show them, contrasting beautifully with the rich blue foliage.

Colorado White Fir

This all-American tree hails from the Rocky Mountains and through the western ranges. It is widely considered to be the most elegant and dramatic of all the larger fir trees, growing 40 feet tall or more in time. For a larger garden, as a specimen, or to plant along the boundary of your property, this outstanding tree is an excellent choice. Known as Abies concolor, because the needles are the same color on both sides, it is hardy even in bone-chilling zone 3, making it an excellent choice if you garden in the Midwest or the north. In fact, it will not grow well south of zone 7, so you can only see it in colder areas – a special treat for northerners.

 

All in all, fir trees have a lot to offer, with remarkable foliage color and dramatic cones. If you are looking for evergreens to bring something different from the usual choices, then one or other of these interesting trees will certainly bring you just what you need.

Plants for Early Spring Blooming

At this time of year, we look anxiously for the beginning of spring, especially those of us who live in cold areas, where April is merely the month when all the snow finally disappears. We might take a walk around our neighborhoods and see plants in bloom, but when we come back through the gate our own gardens can be sadly lacking. If that sounds like you, then some inspiration is needed, so here are some ideas for plants you can use to get the season off to a flying start.

A key method to getting the best garden is to systematically choose plants for different seasons, not just the ones that catch your eye at some moment. It is easy to ‘do’ late spring and early summer – that time has the greatest number of plants blooming, and we are all enthusiastic to get into our gardens. The garden centers are packed with plants, but they choose mostly those in flower at the time, because they sell best. If we do the annual shopping spree, and stop there, then we will inevitably end up with a garden that is wildly colorful in May and June, and plain green the rest of the time.

A much better approach is to stand back a little, and deliberately look for plants that bloom very early, as well as ones for summer and fall. Do that, and you will always have something interesting and colorful going on in your garden – adding to the pleasure and enjoyment you get from your private space. So here are some shrubs that bloom early in spring – in March or April mostly, depending on where you live. These are roughly in order, with the very earliest first.

Shrubs for the Earliest Spring Blossoms

• Redbud – spectacular purple-pink early flowering
• Forsythia – a garden classic in yellow, that never lets us down
• Serviceberry – a pure-white beacon among the sleeping trees
• Magnolia – giant blooms on bare branches

Redbud

There are two redbud trees – the Western Redbud, Cercis occidentalis, and the Eastern Redbud, Cercis canadensis. Both look very much the same, but the Western Redbud grows best in drier, warmer places, and the eastern one grows best in cooler, damper areas. The flowering of these small trees is nothing short of spectacular, and they bloom very early, usually while the rest of the trees are still bare. Their brilliant purple-pink flowers glow in the spring sunshine, and really turn heads. For the rest of the year they have attractive, heart-shaped leaves, and in winter the graceful, twisted branches bring beauty too.

Forsythia

In colder areas especially, this plant is well-known for heralding the spring. Before anything else has begun to grow, the clusters of buds along the bare stems of Forsythia are swelling and bursting, pushing bright-yellow blossoms out until the whole bush glows with gold. It will grow well in partial shade, and in any kind of soil, so this is also an effortless way to start the season with a bang. If you live in zone 4, choose the Lynwood Gold Forsythia, as this is the hardiest. With some others, the flower buds can be killed in the winter months. The plants themselves still grow well, but you rarely see blooms, which can be confusing. Stick to a reliable, cold-hardy variety like Lynwood Gold, and you will never be disappointed by non-flowering Forsythia. If you are in zone 5 or warmer, your choices are greater, and the Show Off Forsythia is an especially good pick. Unlike other varieties, that can grow very large, this one never grows above 6 feet tall, and it is always covered in bloom from top to bottom.

If you become too impatient by February or March for a taste of spring, venture out into the garden and cut a few branches from your Forsythia. Indoors, in a vase of water, they will quickly open their flowers and give you a brilliant taste of what is to come.

Serviceberry

This tree, Amelanchier, is another super-early bloomer. On this upright, vase-shaped shrub or small tree, trusses of white blooms will quickly come out as soon as the coldest weather is over. They glow in the spring light, and set against the smooth, pale-gray bark, they are a vision in white. Later the berries themselves will develop, and these make excellent pies and jams. This is a real two-for-one plant that should be in every northern garden.

Magnolia

Close behind these early harbingers of spring are the magnolia blossoms. There are two kinds of magnolia, the southern evergreen one and the deciduous ones. While the southerners wait for summer, the others are so eager to go that the blooms come out before the leaves, smothering the branches of these wonderful trees in huge, cup-shaped blooms in pink, white and purple, often with several shades on a single flower. Depending on where you live, your trees will start to bloom in February, March, April or early May, but they will always be among the earliest flowers in your garden – and among the most spectacular too.

There are many to choose from, but northern gardeners will be very interested in the ‘Girl Series’, developed at the National Arboretum specifically to flower well even in zone 4. They all have girl’s name, and ‘Jane’, ‘Betty’ and ‘Randy’ all bloom in shades of pink, with the Randy Magnolia the most purple, while the Betty Magnolia is more reddish. Magnolias are surprisingly fast growing, and they soon make good-sized small trees, so allow enough room for them to develop. Ones planted on the south-side of your house will bloom about a week earlier than ones in the open garden, and the leaves will shade your windows in summer, which is always a good thing.

 

Whatever early blooming trees and shrubs you choose – and maybe you will plant them all – remember to keep them regularly watered during the first season or two. Mulching with some rich organic material in spring will conserve moisture and also feed the plants, knowing they will look more and more beautiful as each spring arrives again.

Tips on Pruning Shrubs and Flowering Trees

The succession of flowering shrubs through the seasons is a large part of the beauty of a garden, bringing interest to every part of the year. Yet in many gardens the shrubs are overgrown, and often flower poorly because of incorrect pruning. A little understanding can go a long way to help that, and it is not difficult. Like many things, once we grasp the basics, we learn fast, and are soon able to bring out the best in the plants we grow.

Shrub Pruning Principles

• Always cut just above a leaf or bud
• Prune spring flowers after flowering
• Prune summer and fall flowers in spring
• Remove some older growth every year

Let’s look at each of these ideas in turn.

Always Cut above a Leaf or Bud

Plants have a structure designed for growth. Tucked into the place where each leaf meets the stem is a cluster of cells that can produce new growth – a bud. Towards the ends of branches the buds are often more obvious, but even further down the stem they are there, in a dormant, unformed state. The length of stem between two leaves or buds will never produce new growth. Instead it will simply die back to the first bud, leaving an ugly dead twig, that can also decay and spread disease down into the healthy tissues. When pruning, make the cut just above the bud. To avoid damaging it, or leaving it easily broken, slope the cut up to the bud, not down from it. Some plants have their buds and leaves in pairs, so there, just make a horizontal cut.

Speaking of cutting, it pays to invest a little in a good pair of pruners, or as gardeners say, secateurs. Choose a pair where one sharp blade passes in a scissor action past a thicker blade that holds the stem. Learn to turn the pruners around so the thick blade always touches the part of the stem you will throw away, to avoid bruising. Good secateurs have replaceable blades, as this is easier than sharpening them regularly – they should always make a clean cut.

Prune Spring Flowers after Flowering

Almost all plants that flower in the early months of the growing season have formed the buds for those flowers during the year before. You can often see them when leaves have fallen. The flower buds come out along the stems from the year before, although some plants, like flowering cherries, or crab-apples, develop ‘spurs’, which are short side stems that flowers over many years. Bush roses flower on new wood, and most climbing roses on old, so prune accordingly. If, in the rush of spring-fever, you head into the garden, and trim everything in sight, you will remove most of the flowers from these plants, and have a disappointing spring.

Instead, wait until flowering is over, and then prune. Beside each flower cluster there is also usually a leaf bud, so shorten back, or remove completely, the stems that have just flowered. This will encourage lots of new stems to grow, and these will flower next year.

Prune Summer and Fall Flowers in Spring

Other plants, in contrast, make their blooms at the ends of new growth produced during the current season. Hydrangeas are a classic example. With these plants, we want to encourage them to make sturdy new shoots in spring, that will grow and bloom later. This means that in spring, before the new growth comes, we cut the plant back to a framework of older stems, keeping the plant more compact.

Cut each stem that grew the previous year back to just an inch or two long, or remove older stems and leave new ones, taking off the tip only. This is also the time to think about the overall shape of the plant, how tall you want it, and so on, so some new stems may be left longer, to build that structure or replace old stems you are removing.

Remove Some Older Growth Every Year

As woody plants age, the stems become thick, and often fewer flowers are produced from them. To keep plants permanently in more youthful vigor, these older stems need to be removed. The standard rule is to take out one-third each year, but that can be a bit drastic, and a fifth or a quarter is probably better. Often old stems can suddenly produce strong new shoots lower down, and the ideal thing is to cut them back to that shoot, and then allow it to grow up and replace the old one. Removing old stems at or close to the ground will stimulate the plant to replace them with vigorous new ones from lower down. If you do this regularly, you will keep your plants vigorous for many years, and stop them becoming overgrown and unattractive.

Pinching and Trimming New Growth

With some late-flowering plants, you can create more flowers by plucking out the tip of the new shoots as they grow early in the season, keeping the plant bushier and tripling the number of flowers. Gardeners call this ‘pinching out’. Just remove the soft growth at the end of the stem, before it expands fully. Not all plants respond to this method – Fuchsia will, but Hydrangea won’t, so check before you pinch. This kind of light summer trimming can do the same for some spring flowers too, but doing this needs a bit of research or experimentation before going around your garden and doing it to everything.

 

These few simple guide-lines are really all that you need to prune 90% of the shrubs and flowering trees in your garden. A few, often slower-growing ones, may need little or no regular pruning, but most will benefit from an annual work-over. You will keep your garden full of flowers, on attractive, vigorous shrubs that will look almost as good when they are not flowering, as they do when they are.

Navel or Valencia – Which Orange for Me?

Everyone loves oranges, for that summer in the mouth feeling you get popping a juicy segment, or drinking a glass of freshly-squeezed juice. When it comes from your own tree, then nothing beats the thrill of that orange,. To enjoy the special pleasures of home-grown, you don’t have to live in Florida or southern California, because, like many other citrus, oranges can be grown in pots, keeping them outdoors in summer and inside during the colder months.

What Do You Want to Do with Your Oranges?

If you don’t have a lot of room, you probably will only be able to grow one tree, so what kind of orange tree should you grow? To answer that question, you need to ask yourself just two basic questions:

• For juice or segments?
• Ripe in winter or summer?

Decided? Then let’s look at the options and see which kind of tree you should get.

The orange is part of the citrus family, which includes lemons, grapefruit, satsumas, kumquats and several other kinds of trees. All these differences were created by accidental or purposeful breeding from just four wild trees – mandarin (Citrus reticulata), pomelo (C. maxima), citron (Citrus medica), and papeda (C. micrantha). The orange is a cross between mandarin and pomelo. It is about 75% mandarin genes, which is why it is sweet, while the grapefruit has more pomelo genes, making it bitter. Over the centuries more crosses and breeding took place, and in the 19^th century three or four main types of oranges emerged. The two most important are the Navel orange and the Valencia orange. Let’s look at each of these in turn, and see the differences.

The Navel Orange

Navel oranges have that name because there is a small second orange at the base of the fruit, bulging out and making the end look a bit like a human navel. These oranges have looser skin, so they are easy to peel. They are juicy, but the walls of the segments are stronger, so they break apart into segments easily, without turning to juice and pulp. They also lacks seeds, so those pesky things don’t have to be removed. Obviously, these features make the Navel orange good for eating or adding to salads, and the Navel orange is indeed the number-one eating orange. It is also easy to juice this orange, so you can also enjoy fresh juice, which is sweet and tasty, but a little lighter in color.

There is some variation between varieties, but fruit ripens between December and March, with a peak in January and February. If you like to eat oranges in winter, for that precious vitamin C hit, and to dream of summer, then a Navel orange, like the well-tested Washington Navel Orange, is an obvious choice.

 

The Valencia Orange

Valencia oranges are an ‘all-American’ fruit, despite the name, and they were developed in California by an American landholder called William Wolfskill, when that state was still Mexico. This orange has a thin skin, which is harder to remove, but it is packed with sweet juice, so it is the number-one variety for juicing. It can still be eaten out of the hand, but it is easier to cut the whole fruit into pieces and eat it like a piece of melon, than to try and separate the segments. If you love juice, the Valencia orange is clearly what you need.

Valencia oranges are special because they ripen their fruit in spring and summer. The season is from March to June, and the longer the fruits stay on the trees, the sweeter they become. Because the fruit takes more than a year to ripen, trees bloom for the next crop while the previous one is still on the tree, so in spring a tree has beautiful sweetly-scented white flowers, as well as golden ripe fruit on it. This is such a beautiful sight, that it is reason enough to grow a Valencia orange tree. If you are going to grow your tree in a pot, the Olinda Valencia Orange is an excellent variety that stays small, but carries a good crop. It is also a little more cold-hardy than many others, so if you live in warmer parts of zone 9, it will grow outdoors. Choose a sheltered sunny spot for it.

What’s Your Choice?

That gives you the main differences between these two types of citrus. If your emphasis is on eating in winter, go for a Navel orange tree. If you love summer breakfasts with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, then a Valencia is what you need. Of course, if you have room, the ideal is one of each – then you will have your own fresh oranges for most of the year.

Characteristics	Navel Orange	Valencia Orange
Harvest Season	December to March	March to June
Making Juice	Good	Best
Eating as segments	Best	Not so good
Has seeds	No	Yes

 

Other Kinds of Orange Trees

If you are looking for something else from your oranges, there are other varieties for more specialized purposes.

The Blood orange is a variation that developed in Sicily in the 15^th century. The skin, flesh and juice are all red, varying in intensity between different varieties. It has a distinctive flavor and some people like it for juice, as well as for adding color to salads.

If you love to eat marmalade on your morning toast, then you might want to seek out a Seville orange tree. Although still the same hybrid between mandarin and pomelo, and thus a true ‘orange’, this tree has bitter fruit, unsuitable for eating. However, marmalade aficionados consider it the very best variety for making that preserve, since the bitterness gives a tang that is lacking in preserves made from other oranges. The fruit ripens in February, and doesn’t keep for long, so you need to get out the preserving pan right away.