One of the pleasures of gardening is finding the perfect plants for the perfect microclimate. This joy of discovery makes gardening a constant adventure and finding plants that adapt to a specific area in your garden is challenging. But when you succeed, it can be a thrilling triumph.
Discovering that some of the plants didn't survive, on the other hand, is a disappointment. But each piece of information is equally valuable to an avid gardener.
Our desert climate, not to mention the recent heat wave, help us appreciate a special place in the yard: the shade. For a look at a superb shade garden, I visited Christena Gates at her lovely Tudor style home above Hogle Zoo.
She attributes her love of gardening to her mother and grandmother. Both loved to garden and passed their enthusiasm along to Gates. She is now able to devote more time to her own garden, having just been released from a seven-year calling in which she was the director of the garden guides on Temple Square.
Gates is a native of Southern California but she has spent much of her life in Utah. She first lived here when she attended the University of Utah. While there, she met her husband-to-be and then traveled with him to New York and back to California. After gardening in the Cold Water Canyon area for a few years, they came back to Utah.
When they arrived here, they couldn't find a house they liked, so they custom built their home and have gardened there for the past 28 years. Because the property was covered with native Gambel oak, it was a perfect place, at least from the exposure standpoint, to start a shade garden.
Shade gardens offer comfort and protection from the sun and heat. These cool oases invite us in and are perfect places to escape the rigors of summer.
Not all plants are suitable for shade gardens. Select the wrong plants and they soon become weak and spindly. Eventually they stop growing. Select the right plants and you can make a delightful creation. Shade-loving plants come from throughout the world, yet they share a common thread of being under story plants that do not tolerate the intense direct sun.
Getting the garden started was a major undertaking. "Whenever I wanted to plant a new flower bed, I did not dig the soil, I started mining. All of the rocks you see here are rocks that I dug out of the ground," said Gates. The roots of the oak trees added another challenge. Cutting them out with a pickax was backbreaking work, but it gave a spot to mix flowers into the beds. The trees provide shade and help modify the soil alkalinity, but they also compete with the other plants.
After her garden started growing well and evolving over time, Gates decided to specialize even more. "Our kitchen table overlooks our garden. As we sat there each morning, we would watch the birds and other animals, and we loved the garden. I decided to start a 'white' shade garden."
The white garden is nothing new. There are famous white gardens at many large estate and botanical gardens throughout the world. A white garden in the shade is much more unusual.
Gates wanted the look, so she started to acquire the plants. "I read a lot of articles on white gardens, but they were mostly in the sun. A shade garden offers some unusual problems, and I have had a hard time finding all of the plants I want." If you look at a plant list of her garden, it appears she has been very successful. The name "alba" added to a plant means white, and many plants on her list have that suffix.
Annuals, biennials, perennials, bulbs and woody shrubs, vines, and trees are all part of her white shade garden. Combining these diverse plants creates a cool inviting retreat that complements that outdoor living area.
Keeping white perennials in bloom throughout the summer is very difficult. Gates usually plants several flats of white impatiens as her white annuals. Other white annuals that tolerate some shade include alyssum, ageratum, lobelia, nicotiana, stocks and vinca.
The trees she has selected for the white flowers are Amelanchier or serviceberry. These bloom in the spring with her white bulb flowers. Adding to the woody plants with white flowers is the Clematis montana "alba," with its delicate vining foliage.
Suitable ground covers with white flowers include bishop's weed, periwinkle, pachysandra and sweet woodruff. Gates has added many other low growing plants with white flowers. These include some very interesting white flowered Arabis including some with variegated foliage.
The perennial flowers are the real backbone of her shade garden. Although she modestly claims they have stopped blooming from the heat, the lilies are spectacular. Their giant white trumpets are real show stoppers right now.
Lysimachia deltoides is another very showy perennial with white flower spikes that is in full bloom right now. Cimicifuga or snakeroot is also very showy and it will become more showy over the next few weeks. Japanese anemones are also waiting in the wings to add their flowers during August.
Like most other shade gardens, this one has its share of hostas. However, they have one interesting twist. They are selected for their rich showy foliage but they also are chosen for their white flowers that will show their beauty in the coming weeks. These spectacular plants derive seasonlong beauty from their rich foliage with gray to bright green, variegated, striped, or speckled leaves.
Other plants that Gates has included in her white perennial garden include aruncus, peonies, astilbe and Solomon's seal. Smaller plants include some delicate white campanulas, corydalis, bleeding heart, polemonium, valeriana and veronica.
Dozens of choice plant varieties add beauty and literally create this magnificent shade garden. It is truly an inviting sanctuary from the heat and sun and a labor of love for a person that "would rather be in her garden than anywhere else on earth."