Got a shady garden?
You aren’t alone! Take a drive around Halifax in spring or summer and enjoy the spectacular mature trees that line our city streets. Shade aside, our urban forest helps clean air and soil, filter water, sequester carbon, reduce heat and cooling bills and creates valuable habitat for urban creatures. Communities with more trees have citizens that require fewer hospital visits, hospital stays are shorter and mental health is substantially improved. There’s lots to be gained from healthy trees.
We regularly hear from Haligonians who love their beautiful trees BUT still want to brighten or add color to shady areas of their garden. While pruning trees can increase filtered light, its typically not enough to produce blooms. It takes shade tolerant shrubs with white or vibrant blooms to brighten or bring color into shady garden areas.
This Nitty Gritty Garden Guide will look at our three favorite blooming evergreen shrubs for year round structure and seasonal color. We also include our favorite family of deciduous blooming hydrangea shrubs.
Mountain Laurel
Kalmia latifolia, commonly called mountain laurel, is a gnarled, multi-stemmed, broadleaf evergreen shrub or small tree that is native to Eastern North America. We love its stunning spring flowers and year round foliage. It typically grows as a dense rounded shrub to 5-15’ tall, opening up and developing gnarly branches with age. It is slow to grow but worth the wait…we have been blessed to see mountain laurel the size of small trees on properties in Halifax.
Blooms cover the shrub in late May-June for several weeks with extraordinary blooms ranging in color: white, pink, red and purple with some varieties showing beautiful markings. If not deadheaded, flowers give way to non-showy brown fruits that persist into winter.
Elliptic, alternate, leathery, glossy evergreen leaves (to 5” long) are dark green above and yellow green beneath and reminiscent to the leaves of rhododendrons. All parts of this plant are toxic if ingested.
Not commonly found in urban nurseries, we usually head to Annapolis Valley to source this lovely shrub.
Azalea
There are both evergreen and deciduous varieties of azaleas.
Evergreen azaleas come in a variety of saturated shades of orange and pink as well as white. While all of them can be found in local nurseries, some caution is to be had when siting these lovely shrubs as they are often hardy to USDA zone 6 and may not perform well in exposed locations.
We have found the Girard’s Pleasant White variety to be the most hardy; this shrub’s prolific white blooms on glossy fine foliage makes it a stand-out specimen for the shade garden. It matures at approximately 2 feet high and 3 feet wide; a perfect foreground evergreen shrub. Look for Azalea x Girard’s Pleasant White.
Deciduous azaleas are typically more hardy. These lovely shrubs require a little more care as they drop their leaves in fall. These varieties often grow taller than their evergreen counterparts. We have seen remarkable, mature specimens on properties in Halifax. Abundant hot pink blooms can be seen from blocks away!
We are particularly fond of the Rosy Lights azalea for it’s remarkable blooming capability. It matures at about 6 feet tall and 7 feet wide.
In this image taken from a client’s garden, a mature Rosy Lights azalea is paired with a Mandarin Lights azalea for a colorful, high impact planting.
Rhododendron
There are many varieties of rhododendron across the color spectrum from white, soft purple or pink to deep purple and the rich dark pink-red of the Nova Zembla variety. Sizes vary as well from small compact specimens to those that mature to 10 feet high and wide.
Rhododendrons are widely available locally. Check the tags but for the most part, they are quite hardy making placement flexible around the garden. They prefer shade or filtered light and need only be planted where they have room to grow.
Some varieties have variegated blooms such as the Rhododendron Yakushimanum ‘Percy Wiseman’. This smaller shrub has peach, pink and cream flowers that fade to creamy white and sturdy green leaves with velvety tan colored undersides. It’s a lovely shrub with a warm color palette that works well in a variety of applications including hedging, mass plantings or as a foundation plant.
Hydrangea
We love the year round interest offered by hydrangeas. Like the rhododendron, there are many varieties but we find ourselves turning to the lime-green-white paniculata variety often for their time-tested classic look that works well with most styles and colors of homes.
We use three similar hydrangeas with different sizes to achieve harmony in the garden. The Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ hydrangea has large football shaped flowers in a lovely celadon green that is fresh and green in the summer garden. The blooms age to pink, red and burgundy that perform well during frost and can be left dried for winter interest. Hardy to zone 3, it matures at about 6 feet tall and wide and performs well in part shade or full sun.
A dwarf form of the Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’, the ‘Little Lime’ produces the same flowers in a smaller shrub size. Maturing at 4-5 feet tall and wide, this shrub has a round growth habit. Light green summer blooms make great cut flowers or may be left to turn pink in fall and provide winter interest.
Finally, the Hydrangea paniculata ‘Bobo’ is a compact hydrangea that works well in the part-shade to sun garden. A mature size of about 3 feet tall and 4 feet wide, this shrub is engulfed in large white flowers in late summer turning to pink in fall.