I’ve reported on on my favorite plants for fall color in sunny spots and as promised, here are my faves for shade.

Annuals

Coleus come in dozens of colors and patterns.  Mine are just now, in late October, losing their leaves.  They’ve looked big and bold and colorful all season, until let’s say m id-fall.

Perennials

Begonia grandis.

Begonia Grandis blooms from September through fall.  The foliage is gorgeous all season.

Japanese Anemone in mid-October.

Japanese Anemones look great here at the National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden with petunias.

Hakonechloa Grass.

Hakonechloa Grass doesn’t bloom, but its gold foliage looks great all season and the dried foliage looks lovely in the winter, too.  Behind it is a shrub that’s colorful in the fall and winter, too – the  Acuba.

‘Ice Dance’ Carex.

Carex is the name of a large genus of grass-like plants (technically called sedges, not grasses) and many are evergreen, like the ‘Ice Dance’ variety above.  It’s been a primary groundcover in my shade garden for decades now.  It brightens up even the darkest spot.

Shrubs

Oakleaf Hydrangea at Brookside Gardens.

The glorious Oakleaf Hydrangea  is one of my all-time favorite shrubs and it’s famous for its four-season interest.  The photo above demonstrates its fall glory and coming up next, with no leaves in sight, is its lovely exfoliating bark.

Encore Azaleas

Encore Azalea is a repeat-blooming shrub was highly recommended to me just yesterday by a Prince George’s Master Gardener.  She told me that hers are blooming like crazy even now, in late October.

Posted by Susan Harris.  Photo credits:  Encore Azaleas.  All others by Susan Harris.

I recently attended an “open garden” event held by the Takoma Horticultural Club, during which I grabbed these photos of USDA-trained horticulturist Wendy Bell, whose talk about conservation landscaping we reported here on the blog.

Above, Wendy and Viv’s house is full of charm, and a great backdrop to Wendy’s lawn-free front garden.  She’s quick to tell visitors that this type of garden isn’t for the low-maintenance crowd, that it’s actually more work than a typical lawn.  (Remember, typical lawns in Takoma Park aren’t the perfect, golf-course type, but the barely good enough type of lawn that gets very little care.)

Note how much drama is added to the garden by one rather small Japanese maple.

Above, the view of Wendy’s front garden from her driveway.

In the back yard, lawn has given way to a raised-bed vegetable garden surrounded by a wood-chip path.

Tucked behind the garage are two really dramatic plants – a hardy banana that winters over just fine in the ground, and a high-yield fig tree.  I asked Wendy how long it took the banana to get that large – because I WANT ONE – and she said just two seasons.

Above are examples of focal points, starting with the signature bottle tree in Wendy’s front garden.  Very Southern!  And on the left is a bit of canna drama found in the front yard of Wendy’s next-door neighbor, horticulturist Margaret Atwell.  When not tending her plant-packed garden here in Takoma Park, Margaret works as the rosarian at the  U.S. Botanic Garden.  According to Holly Shimizu, director of the USBG, Margaret’s also in charge of the containers arrangements there, which Holly brags about to anyone who’ll listen.

Above, Margaret’s equally charming , super-colorful house.

A mulch-covered path across Margaret front garden.

Just one of many great combinations in this garden – the bark of a crape myrtle with a variegated Carex and sprawling hydrangeas underneath it.

Above, part of Margaret’s curbside garden.

Posted by Susan Harris.

It’s been a while since I showed off my new front garden in Old Greenbelt, and finally, I can show off the back garden, too.  (Which in Old Greenbelt is called “garden side”.  In contrast to what most of us would call the front but here they call “service side”.  All related to the inner sidewalks that allow pedestrian access to everything.)

After seven months of workers and inspectors and three-jurisdiction permit purgatory, my life is at last quiet.  And here’s where I spend hours a day – on this 11 x 17-foot screened-in porch.  A bug-free place to work and read and nap, with my three indoor cats.  Heaven.

With the porch done, it was time to install the flagstone patio and walkway.  What’s left for me to do is to plant more plants, and to make enough concrete pavers to form a path to the storage shed door.   A DIY job right up my alley (no skill required).

Plants I brought from my old garden include:

• 3 Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’
• 2 oakleaf hydrangeas
• 3 large Japanese Carexes
• LOTS of the much smaller ‘Ice Dance’ Carex, which look like variegated Liriope.
• Some Euphorbia amygdaloides, which is also evergreen and reproduces nicely.  Hope it likes its new home and does lots of that.

Plants already here that I’m using:

• Not much, just a few ‘Emerald Gaiety’ Euonymus shown in the next photo.  It stays low and really brightens up dark spots with its evergreen green and white foliage.
• Oh, and some plain Liriope spicata, which is so useful in preventing erosion on slopes like the one in the photo below.

Plants I bought this year for the back garden include:

• 6 ‘Blue Maid’ hollies and one male pollinator (hopefully he’s up to the task) for screening along both property lines near the house.  They’ll grow fast to be 8-10 feet tall and 6-8 feet wide, and I love that they’re soft to the touch – more so than most hollies.
• 3 Abelia grandiflorias along the sidewalk that will also afford fast screening, though not as high (they’ll be about 5 feet tall).  They grow incredibly fast and smell great.  Pollinators love them, too.
• A ‘Mount Airy’ Fothergilla in a partly shady spot.  I’ve never grown one of these native shrubs and look forward to its bottlebrush-shaped flowers in the spring, and great fall foliage.  It’ll grow to 3-5 feet or so.
• A Korean Spice viburnum, which I planted right next to my bench because when it’s in bloom I want to be close enough to it to take in its amazing scent.  It’ll stay nice and compact, at about 5-6 feet tall and a similar width.
• A ‘Shasta’ doublefile viburnum, which is to my eye the prettiest of all viburnums.  I had a couple in my last garden and have GOT to have one here.  It’ll grow to 6-8 feet tall and 10-12 feet wide.
• A ‘Ghost’ weigela – for its yellow-green, almost chartreuse foliage, and the fact that it’ll grow to about 5 by 5 feet, just the right size for my small garden.  I love the large old-fashioned weigelas but only have room for one of the smaller varieties, like this one.’
• 6 lacecap hydrangeas.
• 3 Cryptomerias (Japanese cedar), which is probably my all-time favorite conifer.  They’re not just beautiful but also soft to the touch, and grow incredibly fast even in shady spots.

More Plants Needed!
In the next two photos particularly, you see lots of bare mulch, where I’m welcoming plant suggestions, and free plants.  My former neighbors have offered me lots of Rudbeckias and Solomon’s Seal, which I’ll be picking up and planting when it cools down in the fall.  And a new neighbors has a few huge hostas she’s willing to donate divisions from if I do the dividing.  Deal!  Donated plants are great for filling in new gardens while new plants are still small, as is my budget.

The photo below points to another problem in search of a solution – how to hide the garden hose.  Whatever the solution, it has to look good AND be super-fast to use.

Posted by Susan Harris.

If I had room in my tiny garden for a crape myrtle or two, I’d buy them right now, when we can see exactly what color they are.  I never trust the photos on the tags or even less, the images online, which vary all over the place according to the monitor you see them on.  So whether it’s 100 degrees or not, I’d wait to buy these summer bloomers until they’re in all their glory.

And what else makes me long for a larger garden?  Crape myrtles are on sale – 30 to 50 percent off – starting tomorrow. 

But wait – Behnkes’ shrub-buyer Miri tells me crape myrtles aren’t just for large gardens that can accommodate 35-foot-tall specimens.  There are varieties now available as short as 2 feet – love those breeders!

Hydrangea Tardiva in my old garden, pruned to a fan shape.

The other shrub I can’t resist when I see them in bloom are panicle hydrangeas, like PeeGees and Tardivas.  In my former, much larger garden I had just one Tardiva and it must be putting on a grand show about now.  My next-door neighbors had a whole hedge of them in tree form in their front yard and pedestrians stopped to ask about them.  And like most hydrangeas, the blooms look good for months.  Below are some Tardivas already looking gorgeous on the Behnkes lot, and next to them, the treeform of PeeGee Hydrangea, which I’d love to see full-grown.  Anyone got one in their garden?

Hydrangea Tardiva (L) and Treeform PeeGee (R)

Posted by Susan Harris.

by Larry Hurley

Over the years I have been adding more native plants to provide better food sources for birds and I have gotten rid of most of my lawn and replaced it with ornamental perennials, trees and shrubs.  If I am spending time outdoors, I’d rather be grooming perennials than cutting grass. I have the usual challenges with bird seed: too much goes to the squirrels, for example, so I feed mainly in the winter. The thing that I find that provides the most birds for the buck, though, is a birdbath. They seem old-fashioned, but they really attract birds to the garden, and except for an occasional cleaning, they are easy to maintain.

In my mostly shade garden, I have a pretty solid understory of ferns, hostas, hellebores and so on. I leave the leaves that fall in winter on the beds (oak, hickory, tulip poplar) and let them decay over the season, providing a place for ground feeding birds to hunt. I have shrubs and short trees (Fothergilla, hydrangeas, winterberry, spicebush) for nesting sites and for places for the birds to sit as they wait their turn at the birdbath, and of course, the tall trees, again for nesting and to provide a place for the birds to hunt for insect food. The birdbath is the corner tavern as it were, a place where all sorts of birds come to bathe and drink. All from the same water, but that’s birds for you. The best thing is, unlike with birdseed, the squirrels leave the birdbath alone.

I’m in Bethesda but near Rock Creek, so although we have a limited selection of birds, it’s not just English Sparrows and Starlings. We routinely have robins, goldfinches, house finches, grackles and mourning doves at the bath, especially in dry weather.

The smooth surface of this bird bath makes it easy to clean.

Birdbaths need some maintenance. The water should be changed at least once a week to prevent mosquitoes from going from egg to adult. You don’t want to be growing more mosquitoes. The birdbath also grows algae, especially in the sun (warm water in sun with a smattering or splattering of bird poop is the perfect recipe for algae). Dump it out with the old water. My bird baths are granite and bluestone, and I scrub them out every couple of weeks with an SOS pad. This gets rid of most of the algae, cleans the bath of whatever, and gets rid of mosquito eggs. I think that a stone or glazed surface of the bowl will make cleaning and algae control easier than a rough surface.

If you want, you can run the birdbath all winter with a birdbath heater, providing a little spa for your birds. They do have a hard time finding water in winter. I don’t do this myself. I suppose the real birders have a little bird sauna although I admit I haven’t actually seen one. Maybe in Norway.

So: buy a birdbath; change the water; scrub it out once in awhile; enjoy plenty of birds all season long.

Photo credits.  chickadee, robin.