The Benefits of Gardening in the Shade with Hostas

Shade gardens can be way more than just pretty and green - they can be absolutely stunning and delightfully colorful, with lots of different textures! Join our garden expert as he discusses the various ways you can create a vibrant shade garden. Find out some of the most wonderful plants to include in your shade garden to enhance interest and variety.

Hi everyone, I'm Scott with Spring Hill Nurseries and today, I'm sitting in the shade because we are rethinking the shade garden. Often, gardeners don't think they can plant anything colorful or beautiful in the shade but there are a ton of that you can add in your shade garden that will add interest to your whole yard. So, we're going to take a look around and see some of those varieties. And then, in video number two, I'm going to show you all the different varieties of hostas. So, come on, let's look at some of those shade plants. When you think of shade gardens, you often think of ferns. Well, this is not your regular old fern. This is Japanese painted fern. As you can see, we've got some purple, we've got this sort of greenish white and it can really get white as the season goes on. Over here, we have another variety as well known as the Christmas ferns. So, it's not just that sort of fern jungle look that you think of, there are many different varieties. Now here are some really pretty flowering shade plants called astilbe. Now it's still spring time here at the nurseries in Ohio so they haven't flowered yet but we do have some buds beginning to form. You can have astilbe in all different colors. There's white, purple and pink, red, many different colors and they really are beautiful and they are standouts in the shade garden for flower color. And the foliage is great looking too. One of the old fashioned favorites of the shade garden is the bleeding hearts. Here, we have the gorgeous pink variety, and here's the heart, here it is. See how pretty that is? They also come in white. Let's see if we can get in here and see the white ones. You may remember these from your grandmother's garden. Well, they still look beautiful in today's gardens. When getting plants for your shade garden, one thing to think about is some varieties that can handle both sun and shade. Heuchera is one of my top choices to handle both sun and shade. It comes in a variety of colors as you can see here. We go from purple to red, orange, we've got green. Here we've got nearly black. There's also this really gorgeous yellow variety here. Now one of the most popular forms of heuchera is red coral bells. You probably see this all over. It's just starting to bloom out here and in just a week or so, it's going to be gorgeous with its beautiful red flowers. And then, when the flowers are done, you've got this really nice foliage all season long. There's another variety here of heuchera which has some really neat foliage patterns. So, this is a great one for both sun and shade. Another pretty variety for shady areas is silver beacon lamium. It's a low grower with really nice flowers. These here are purple. There are also some pink varieties is you can see and the foliage is really neat. It's got green with sort of silver centers that really fill up the majority of the leaf. And finally, we come to hostas, everybody's favorite shade plant. In our next video, I'm going to take you on a tour of some of the newest and neatest hosta varieties out there. So, we've learnt today that the shade garden just doesn't have to be green. It can be colorful, it can be pretty, it can have texture. So, rethink your shade garden, you'll love it. I'm Scott with Spring Hill Nursery.