[gentle music]
- Melissa Apland: Hi! - Audience: Hi!
- Melissa: Hi, everyone.
My name is Melissa Apland.
Welcome, I'm the owner of Bee Balm Wildscapes.
I have a native plant gardening business in Madison.
I design, maintain, and install native plant gardens.
Welcome to my presentation,
"Native Plants for Shady Spaces
and Lessons Learned From My Own Yard."
So, a little bit about me.
I actually grew up in Washington state,
out in the Pacific Northwest,
and I grew up in a little neighborhood
surrounded by trees,
surrounded by native plants, right?
We were in the forest--
not actually the forest that's on the screen--
but the native plants were what were around us.
When you looked out your window, you saw native plants.
Native plants were what I played on.
Native plants were what I played with.
Native plants were what marked the seasons.
They were the fabric of my childhood,
and they gave this place that I grew up
this really beautiful sense of place
because you didn't have a community of plants like that
anywhere else in the world.
So, it-- You knew that you were home when you saw the plants.
I loved living in the Pacific Northwest,
but I was tired of it,
so I came to Wisconsin for college.
I have a degree in geology from Beloit College.
I met my husband in college, and we moved to Madison,
and we rented for a while,
and I got into veggie gardening, and it was pretty good.
And eventually, we decided to buy a house.
So, when we were looking for a house,
I was really excited for somewhere where I could garden
and I was really excited to grow some vegetables.
And the house we ended up buying, unfortunately--
not unfortunately-- was this house,
which is completely surrounded
by mature shade trees. [audience laughs]
So, my beautiful dreams of vegetable gardening
did not pan out, but I still really wanted to garden.
It had a lot of lawn.
It had a lot of just, like, whatever.
And I said, what else can I grow?
Well, everybody talks about native plants.
So, I decided I'll put in some native plants in my house.
And the native plants that I was going to be able to grow
were not the beautiful full-sun prairie plants that we are all,
that we're, that we all have seen
and that maybe we have all tried
and failed to grow in our own yards.
The native plants that I was going to be able to grow
were shade plants.
So, since this is a native plant presentation,
I feel like we should talk about
why should we plant native plants?
And there's really three big reasons.
So, the big reason that everybody has heard about
is that native plants support native pollinators.
We like bees and we like butterflies,
and we should plant native plants
because they are what best supports bees and butterflies.
And I think that is a great reason to plant native plants,
but it's not the full picture.
The other reason we should plant native plants
is because energy has to move through the food chain
if you want any part of the food chain to survive.
So, you have the Sun.
And unless we're thinking about, like, hydrothermal vents
under the ocean floor,
the Sun is the source of all energy on the planet.
Plants capture the sun's energy and they grow leaves.
And then, if you wanna have higher orders of life,
like birds, the energy in the plant's leaves
needs to be converted to something that birds can eat.
Birds generally don't eat leaves,
but a lot of birds do eat insects,
and insects are phenomenally efficient
at converting plant matter to their beautiful,
yummy, squishy, protein-filled bodies.
[audience laughs]
So, compared to every other, like, type of animal,
insects are it for converting the energy stored in plants
to energy that is accessible to the animals
that we want to be around, like birds.
If you do not have a yard that supports native insects,
you don't have a yard that supports native birds
because a lot of native birds feed-- they can eat--
maybe they can eat seeds as adults,
but to rear a clutch of chicks, they need to feed them insects.
Insects, when you're a bird
and you're rearing a clutch of chicks,
you need those things out of the nest as quickly as possible,
and you need to feed them the most concentrated food possible.
So, you need to feed them insects.
Insects can eat plants, right?
We have plants in our yard.
You saw the picture of my yard.
There's plants in it.
Unfortunately, the insects in Wisconsin
evolved to eat the specific plants that are in Wisconsin.
So, there, when you have a yard that is full of plants
that are not from Wisconsin, that are not native here,
the insects that are in the environment
do not recognize those as food.
Most insects are actually specialists.
They can eat a few species of plants,
a few related genre, maybe, like, a bigger collection,
but they can't go so far, often,
as to eat a plant from Asia or from Europe.
So, even the lushest urban jungle yard
that is full of plants,
if all of the plants aren't native,
the insects cannot eat the plants there.
And this is all paraphrased from this book.
A lot of you have probably heard of Doug Tallamy.
He is the, he's the guy, right?
He's the guy about why you should plant native plants.
This is a fantastic book.
This is Bringing Nature Home by Doug Tallamy.
If you are interested in the why,
it is critical to plant native plants
to preserve the entire movement of energy
through the food chain, this is the book for it.
And you might say, well,
if these native plants are so important to the food chain,
can't the animals just go to where the native plants are?
And they can,
but there's less space with native plants in it
than you might expect.
This is a land use map of Dane County.
You can see in the map--
So, the brown is cultivated crops.
The red is cities.
The green is forests.
And I wanna put a note on forests,
which is that, yes, forests are full of native plants,
but forests and wild areas
are also under extraordinary pressure
from nonnative plants and overgrazing
and the suppression of natural forces like fire,
so they might not be supporting as much life
as they would have before European settlement.
So, what happens if you're a bird
and all of the land that you used to live in
gets converted to these uses that aren't sustaining you,
they're not providing you with food?
You die.
You just can't live there.
You can't raise a clutch, you can't find food to eat.
You die.
And the good news,
'cause this is a little bit of a bleak picture, right?
We've converted most of our land to human use.
Most of this is an ecological dead zone
if we're thinking about energy moving through the environment.
The good news is that a lot of these species
are actually really adaptable
if we only give them space to live.
If we only provide the conditions they need,
they can move into our urban environments
and they can live in our backyards.
What do they need?
They need the native plants
that the native insects evolved to eat.
Okay, so those are the two ecological reasons
that I think you should plant native plants.
The third reason is that I think
that a lot of people today are very lonely.
I think that a lot of people today are very lonely,
and they're very disconnected from things that are important,
like the changes of the seasons
and feeling like a part of nature.
You know, we live in our houses,
we go to our jobs in these office buildings,
and then we come home to our houses,
and you just don't kind of have a sense of place.
You don't have a sense of belonging to the Midwest,
which is a truly fantastic place to live.
Mid-- Wisconsin is absolutely incredible.
The geology here is fantastic.
The plants are amazing.
The native insects are fascinating.
The birds are beautiful.
We don't get any of that
when we look out at our yard with our Norway maple
and our bluegrass and our hostas.
So, I think that there's something
really, really important
to trying to grow something native,
even if it doesn't work that well.
I think that there's something important to trying
and to paying attention to the plants
and to paying attention to the rhythms of the natural world
and what your plants are doing
and what the insects in your yard are doing.
I think there's something really good for the soul there.
And that's enough on why you should do it.
Okay. [laughs]
Why should you plant a shade garden?
Well, you should probably plant a shade garden
'cause if you have shade, it's your only choice.
Other gardens aren't gonna work.
[audience laughs]
The other reason-- okay, it adds life to an empty space.
Maybe, what do you have in your shade garden right now?
I know that before I planted native plants in it,
I had a lot of dirt.
Shade gardens are cool
'cause they flower earlier in the season than prairie gardens.
So, prairie gardens are used to having a lot of sun
available to them all the time.
A shade garden is used to having a lot of sun
available to it in April before the trees leaf out.
So, a lot of the plants
that you're gonna plant in a shade garden
have evolved to take advantage of this period
before the trees leaf out,
and so they do their growing and their reproducing in April,
in May, when there is light available to them.
There is less weed competition in a shade garden
because your site's constraints are actually its strengths.
We think of a site that doesn't get enough sun
as being a negative,
but really, I'm gonna say that
if your site is limited by sun, that is awesome,
because that means
that every single full-sun weed cannot grow there.
The only weeds that can grow there are adapted to shade.
So, if you find plants
that do really well within your site's constraints,
you're gonna have a really robust garden.
And the other great thing about a shade garden,
I don't know about you guys,
but the first time I was looking at native plants,
I looked at the long list of native plants
and I said, "Oh, my gosh, there are a lot of these things.
I don't know which ones to plant."
Most of those plants are full-sun plants.
So, if you're only looking at plants
that can survive in a shade garden,
you're gonna have a much shorter list,
and it's gonna be way easier to choose.
[audience laughs]
So, what-- "Oh, my goodness.
"Oh, goodness, oh, goodness.
"I have only ever bought my plants at Home Depot.
What is a native plant?"
[all laugh]
A native plant is a species
that was present before European settlement.
That's all.
And the cool thing about these plants,
like I said, is that they have
these specialized relationships with insects.
The insects here have evolved to eat them.
And they-- anyway.
So, how do you figure out which plants are native?
My favorite resource for information about plants
is prairiemoon.com.
Prairie Moon is here at the Garden Expo.
They have a booth,
but they also have a fantastic website
that you can always access.
And they list-- they have range maps.
So, if you go somewhere,
let's say you go to the farmer's market
and you're walking around and you see a booth with plants
and you say, "My goodness, I love plants.
"I would love some of these plants,
but I know that I would like to plant native plants."
And you asked the person at the booth at the farmer's market
"Which of these plants are native
and which of these plants like shade?"
and they say, "This plant,"
there's a lot of reasons why the information that they have
that they are telling you might not be right.
And so, it's important to check that a plant is actually native.
And what you can do is you can whip out your phone
and look the plant up on Prairie Moon's website.
And if it doesn't show up on there,
because every single native plant
that you are going to find in cultivation
is on Prairie Moon's website,
you can know that it's not native.
And if it does show up,
you can actually look at the range map
and make sure that it is native to Wisconsin.
Even a "native plant sale," there are a lot of reasons why
nonnative plants might show up at a native plant sale.
Even a native plant sale may include
nonnative plants, so just check.
It's up to you to decide if a plant
that's native to Illinois is native enough for you.
It's your garden.
But it's good to be informed.
Be extra careful at a large nursery.
Anywhere where you can actually go and walk around
and look at the plants, just be extra careful
that you are actually getting a native plant.
Trust Latin names over common names
because a lot of plants might share the same common name,
but a Latin name refers to one species.
And if you are planting a seed mix,
if it says "wildflower"-- I cannot emphasize this enough.
[all laugh]
If you are planting a seed mix
and it says "wildflower" in the name, it is not native.
It needs to say "native wildflower."
So, just be careful with seed mixes.
Lessons learned from my own yard.
So, I started out and I made this big yard,
which we'll talk about later,
and I looked at the big list of plants that were available
and I said, "Oh, my goodness, this is overwhelming.
So, I bought my plants from the Plant Dane native plant sale
the first time, which is happening now
if you are watching this in person.
It is February,
and the Plant Dane native plant sale is happening now.
And it's a fantastic resource
and you should absolutely get plants from it.
So, I-- They sell these premade kits.
So, I got the shady, I don't know, whatever it was called.
"Shady woodland kit."
And in the kit that I got was this flower,
which is, it says Eupatorium.
It's actually in Conoclinium.
This is Conoclinium coelestinum, the mistflower.
And so, last summer, I was thinking about this plant
and I wanted to know more about it.
And I looked it up on Prairie Moon's website,
and I saw the following range map. [audience chuckles]
I also wanna note, before I talk about the range map,
that when I looked this plant up and when I researched it,
like, when I heard about this plant initially,
I was told that it is quite aggressive.
So, in my yard, this has turned, from six plants,
this has turned into, like,
a five-by-five patch of mistflowers.
So, anyway, I looked it up, saw this range map.
This is not a plant that's native to Wisconsin.
The light green means that it's native to the county.
The dark green means that it is somewhere
in the state, it exists.
It could exist in only one patch in the state,
but the green is kind of native to the state.
The yellow is native but rare in the county.
And you can see the color Wisconsin is,
which is none of those, it's brown,
which means not native.
And a note on the Plant Dane native plant sale,
which is fantastic.
And I mean no disrespect to it, it's awesome.
You should absolutely buy plants from it.
You will not be able to find native plants cheaper
than at the Plant Dane native plant sale.
They have updated this kit
so it doesn't include this flower anymore.
It's all native.
It's a fantastic little shade kit.
The other thing to watch out for are cultivars.
This is what's gonna get you at the big box nursery.
So, I went to the big box nursery around this same time.
Actually got the plants in the spring,
and then, in the fall,
the big box nursery was having a 50% off sale
on every single plant,
and I said, "Oh, my gosh, I got to get in on this."
So, I went there,
and I looked at all the plants, and I saw cultivars.
And a cultivar is a selection of plants
that changes a characteristic of the plant.
So, it might change,
you know, it might put more petals on the flower.
It might change the foliage from green to purple.
It might make the plant shorter overall.
It might make the plant flower for a longer period of time.
Some of these changes,
in particular, changes to the flowers
or the foliage color will probably reduce
how much the plant is used by insects.
Changes to the flower period or the overall stature
or the bloom density,
those probably won't have any effect on native insects,
so I would feel comfortable planting a cultivar
that changes one of those features in your yard.
If it changes the flower, I would avoid.
The other thing to watch out for with cultivars
is that often they are crossbreeds of two species
to create some sort of new, interesting thing
that can be marketed to you, the garden consumer,
and is not just, like, a seed that anybody can plant.
Or they might just be a nonnative plant,
and it might only have a common name on it.
So, I purchased this truly wonderful
and beautiful flower as it was labeled as Jacob's ladder.
Jacob's ladder, Polemonium reptans,
is a fantastic shade plant.
It does great in a variety of conditions.
I think that everybody should plant it in a shade yard.
So, I saw that this was a Jacob's ladder and I said,
"Oh, okay, I could do a cultivar.
"For half off, I could do a cultivar of Jacob's ladder,
no problem."
And I purchased this.
And then, I was putting together this talk
and I was thinking about cultivars,
and I looked up this cultivar,
and I found out that what I have in my yard
is not a cultivar of Polemonium reptans,
native to the Midwest.
It is a cultivar of Polemonium caeruleum,
which is native to Europe.
So, it's easy to be excited and get fooled.
It is gorgeous.
It's fantastic.
It isn't native.
I'm probably gonna pull this out.
I'm not sure what I'm gonna do about my mistflower, ugh.
I'm probably gonna pull this out
'cause I have a lot of Jacob's ladder in that bed,
and the Jacob's ladder is reseeding, which I love,
and I don't want this to reseed
and I don't want this to hybridize
with my native Jacob's ladder, so I think I got to take it out.
So, you have a shade garden,
and you wanna find plants that are gonna work there.
The traditional advice, which I think is kind of useful,
is that if your site gets more than six hours of sun,
you have a full-sun garden.
And this is talking about sun that hits the ground.
This is not talking about, like... [laughs]
I do this really optimistic thing in my yard
where I look up at the sky...
[all laugh]
And I see the blue sky and I say,
"I probably see enough blue sky here to grow a full-sun plant."
And I forget that my house is surrounded by tall trees
and it is on a north-facing slope,
so the sun isn't coming from up above.
It's actually blocked.
What you need to do is look down at the ground
and look and see how many hours you have of sun
actually hitting the ground.
If you have more than six hours of sun,
you can plant the full-sun plants.
If you have four to six hours of sun,
you can plant plants labeled part-sun.
And if you have four hours of sun
and in particular, if your site gets a lot of sun,
say it gets three hours of really intense afternoon sun,
you're probably a little closer to that part-sun category
than to, like, a full deep-shade category.
But, anyway, under four hours, you have shade.
Plants don't think like this.
This is a really great-- This is a really great shorthand,
and I really wish I had, like, a super-good answer
of how to figure out exactly which plants will succeed
in your site, and I don't.
Plants don't think like this.
Sometimes, this will work really well for you.
Sometimes, you'll pick out a plant,
I'm gonna call out Canada ginger,
fantastic native shade plant, and you plant it in your garden
that gets three hours of afternoon sun,
so it's solidly a shady garden, right,
it's under four hours, and the Canada ginger gets too hot,
it gets too much sun, and it dies.
So, a slightly more complicated rating system exists
and is harder to find and requires more research.
The North Carolina Botanical Garden
has a list of plants that you can search,
and they list the "heli-ophily,"
"heliophile," "helio-phily"... I don't know.
I don't know how to pronounce this word. [audience laughs]
They list the rating of how much sun it likes.
[laughs]
And this is like a gardening--
This is a Gardening 101 talk,
and this is like a Gardening 102 subject.
But if you're looking at your native plants
and you have the Latin name, it says Asarum canadense,
which is the Canada ginger,
you can put that into this website here
and it will tell you Asarum canadense
has a heliophily rating of 1.
It likes dense shade.
You might look up another plant.
You might look up zigzag goldenrod,
another fantastic shade plant,
or the aforementioned Jacob's ladder,
and you'll find that it has a heliophily rating of 3 or 4,
which means that it can tolerate a little bit of sun,
it wants a little bit more light.
And then you look up something like leadplant or prairie dock,
and you find a heliophily rating of 10.
This is a plant that only wants full sun
and will not do well in your garden.
So, if you like having a lot of information
and you're feeling a little bit more technical,
you can use this tool to look up the plants.
If you have a super shady site,
you're gonna want things in the 1 category.
If you have a little more sun,
you're gonna want things closer to a 5, et cetera.
Also consider soil moisture.
This is important to the plants.
The shade plants under cultivation
are usually pretty, like, they have a pretty broad range
of soil moistures that they thrive in.
So, just think about this
if you know that your site is, like, super, super dry
or super, super wet.
How do you structure your planting?
Okay, you've got your site picked out.
You have your shady site,
and you've kind of thought, "This has a lot of shade,
"this has a medium shade,
"this is actually a little bit sunnier than I was realizing.
What do I put here?"
First thing to think about, do you wanna add a tree?
Trees have fantastic wildlife value.
They're quite big,
so they have a lot of leaves for insects to eat.
Trees are fantastic.
You probably have enough trees, though,
so maybe consider a shrub.
Shrubs are also nice, and they're big.
And then include flowers and grasses.
I like to plant my gardens one plant per square feet
at a minimum.
Sometimes, if I'm really concerned about a garden
doing well, I'll plant more than one plant per square foot,
because planting densely
is the best thing you can do to have your garden establish well.
If you plant really scantily,
it's probably gonna take a bit to fill in.
Include a background of grasses or sedges.
In shade, you're probably gonna include a sedge
'cause they just do better in shade.
I like to do 50% background plants, 50% sedges.
They have tremendous wildlife value and they look good,
and they help your planting look organized,
and they help your planting look, like, full
when your flowers aren't doing much.
A shorter overall height.
If you have a garden in front of your house,
a shorter overall height is going to look more organized.
If you have a garden in the back of your house,
up against your fence,
or you wanna block the view to your neighbor,
you might wanna go with taller plants.
But just consider, I'm gonna talk a lot about short plants
just because people often want a garden
that looks a little bit more, like, organized than not,
so we're gonna kind of focus on shorter plants.
Try to get things that bloom spring through fall.
Spring blooms are gonna be easy to find.
Fall blooms are going to be easy to find.
Summer blooms might be a little bit more challenging.
And you wanna include one aster and one goldenrod.
These are keystone pollinator plants.
So, the life cycle of bumblebees is that
at the end of the season, the bumblebee nest creates a queen.
The queen goes out into the environment
and she looks for flowers.
And the flowers that she's gonna find
are asters and goldenrods, 'cause they bloom in the fall,
and she consumes, like, pollen and nectar from them,
and then she uses the fat stores that she builds to hibernate.
So, if she doesn't have those late-season pollen resources,
she's gonna have a harder time surviving the winter.
So, include an aster and a goldenrod.
"Okay, okay, okay.
"Kind of wrapping my head around this.
Still a lot to handle."
Your second tip to success,
I cannot emphasize this enough,
is, one of the best things
you can do to end up with a garden
that has native plants
is to get them from a specialist grower.
There-- We are lucky in Madison.
We have a dozen within a 45-minute drive
of small native plant growers.
These are people that grow only native plants,
and they're small businesses,
and they're often woman-owned businesses.
These are really, really cool people.
You should support them.
In the back, on the table,
I actually have little 4x3 cards
and they have my business info on the front.
And then, on the back, they have a list
of all of the little local...
Yep, all of the local native plant nurseries.
So, this is really helpful information
if you're in this room with me right now.
And if you're not, DNR maintains a list of native plant growers.
So, you can also go here
and see who's growing native plants in your area.
One reason to go with native plant growers
is they're awesome and you should support them.
The other reason is that you want to get your plants small.
You want the 2.5 by 2.5-inch plug-size plants.
You go to the big box nursery-- if you can get 'em.
You go to the big box nursery,
and they sell the plants in the quarts and the gallons,
and you pay a decent amount of money for them,
and then I'm up here telling you,
"Plant one plant per square foot,"
and you say, "Those things are $15 each.
What are you talking about?"
But if you go to the specialist native grower,
you're gonna find the plug-size plants,
which are 2.5 by 2.5 inches,
and you're gonna pay, like, $3, $4, $5, $6 each for them,
and your entire planting is going to be
so much more affordable.
And I...
In two years, you're not gonna know the difference.
Honestly, in one year, you might not know the difference.
I only plant with these.
The exception being there are some shade plants
that you cannot get in this size.
Because there are two broad categories of shade plants.
There are shade plants that are easy to grow,
and these are gonna be easy to find in the plug size.
And there are shade plants
that have more complicated requirements
to germinate the seeds,
and these are gonna be hard to find in the plug size.
So, if you have a plant that you really want
and the plant is Canada ginger or mayapples
or bloodroot or Podophyllum peltatum,
the one that goes like this.
Oh, my gosh, um...
- [people speaking indistinctly] - Yeah.
Not bellwort, the one with the leaves on the side.
- Attendee 1: Solomon's seal?
This is the worst plant for me to not think of the name of.
- Attendee 2: Solomon's seal?
- Melissa: Solomon's seal!
Goodness gracious.
- Attendee 3: Trout lily. - Melissa: Trout lilies.
Trout lilies are the other one.
Everybody, everybody randomly-- don't actually do this.
Everybody shout the name of a plant
that you cannot find for the life of you.
These plants are gonna be a lot harder to find.
You're not gonna find them at the smaller growers
'cause they're too hard to find,
but you are gonna find them at the big box nursery
that I just told you not to go to.
So, if you want these more complicated plants,
check out the big box nursery.
You can also order them bare root in the spring.
In the early spring, you literally just pay $4
and they mail you a chunk of the root,
and you plant that in the ground and it turns into a plant.
Fantastic way to get these harder to germinate plants.
And again, much cheaper than $8 to $25 for a gallon.
Two resources I wanna call out specifically,
Agrecol is a large,
like, industrial-sized native plant grower in Edgerton.
So, if you have a big garden and you need to purchase,
let's say, 1,000 square feet worth of plants,
which might be 1,000 plants,
the local nurseries, who are growing 4,000
or 5,000 or 6,000 plants a year
might not be able to handle that request.
Edgerton grows millions of plants a year,
and they are the place to go if you want to get a lot of plants.
Johnson's Nursery in Milwaukee.
If you would like to put in a shrub
and you would like to put in an actual native shrub
and not a cultivar,
which is what you often find at the big-box nursery,
Johnson's Nursery is the place to grow.
They grow actual straight species,
native shrubs, and trees.
Fantastic resource.
How do you choose your plants?
This is really hard.
The nice thing about shade gardens,
like I said, is that your choices are going to be limited.
A premade kit is a great place to start.
Despite the fact that I ended up
with a nonnative plant out of one, these are--
If you're overwhelmed by choosing plants,
you can either look at premade kits
that are available nationally
and then buy those plants from a local grower,
or some of the local growers have premade kits,
and you can purchase those.
You can add plants to them.
You can play with them a little bit.
You can say, you know,
"I really want, like, six species in here
instead of the four," so you can pop in another two.
But they're a fantastic place to start
or to get inspiration from.
Prairie Moon's website is a great resource,
with the caveat that this is quite an extensive resource.
If you're the kind of person who wants a lot of information,
you can go to Prairie Moon's website
and you can put in your filters.
You can say, "I want something that's native to Wisconsin,
"and it likes medium moisture and it likes shade,
and it blooms in May," and whatever,
and they'll give you a list of plants.
But they're gonna give you a list of, like, 30 plants,
and then you're gonna go to your fantastic,
local, small-scale native plant nursery,
and you're gonna be able to find, like, two of them,
just because Prairie Moon has every single plant.
So, it might be too much information.
If you're just looking up a specific plant
to understand more about it, it's a fantastic resource.
My favorite book is this one.
This is Native Plants of the Midwest by Alan Branhagen.
This is a great book.
So, if you wanna look in a book,
you wanna just page through it and look at the pretty plants,
I would highly recommend this.
A lot of native plant books
are really focused on prairie species,
and they-- you look through them,
hoping to find out what to plant in your yard,
and you find zero shade plants.
This book has a section on trees.
it has sections on shrubs,
it has sections on prairie plants,
and it has sections on woodland plants and ground covers.
This has the information that you are going to need.
This is a great resource.
Local nurseries.
They're run by awesome, super friendly,
super knowledgeable people.
You can just reach out to them.
You can say, "Hey, I have a shady site.
I need 150 plants," or 20 plants or whatever your number is.
"What do you have?"
And they can help you out.
I also, through my business--
Of course, I have to include this.
I provide consultations for homeowners.
I both do projects and I help people who wanna DIY.
So, I'm always happy to come out to somebody's yard
and provide you with recommendations of plants
that would do well in your yard.
How do you organize the planting?
Plant a lot of plants.
I like to do one per square foot.
Spread your grasses and your sedges throughout your planting.
Put your tall plants in the back.
Put your short plants in the front.
Choose a palette of species,
and then plant those in clumps together.
Don't choose-- It is better if you have a small site
and you need a hundred plants
to choose, like, I don't know, ten plants of ten species
or 15 plants of fewer species than to choose 40 plants.
Two plants of forty species,
two and a half plants of forty species,
you get where I'm going with this.
Keeping your--
Keep your plant list a little bit restrained
and go with more individuals of each species.
Okay, oh, my goodness, so many text slides.
[laughs]
Now, we're gonna talk about
what your shade garden might look like,
because we've seen a lot of shade gardens
that have a lot of mulch in them, a lot of wood mulch.
I think we should get rid of the wood mulch in a shade garden,
and we should create a place where the plants fill in
and intermingle and work together
so that when one plant looks good, it has the spotlight,
and then when it fades back,
another plant comes in and takes the spotlight,
and if this one gets really tall, then this one is shorter.
Here are some of my favorite yards.
This is just somebody's shade garden.
The other thing I wanna note about these,
which we'll talk about too, is that these are all old yards.
Native plant gardens take a long time to establish.
This is not a two-year-old yard.
This is a yard that has been growing here
for probably, like, five to fifteen years.
That's why it looks so good.
So, here you have a lot of wild geranium blooming.
Another fantastic plant.
Wild geranium can look a little thin and sparse,
so this has a lot of Canada ginger filling in
and providing coverage of the ground.
Especially later in the season when your,
when your other plants might not be looking so good,
the Canada ginger is gonna stay strong.
This is a nice mixed, full, healthy planting.
You're also not gonna get a lot of weeds germinating here
'cause there's just not any bare ground.
These two pictures are from Olbrich Gardens.
Of course, Olbrich Gardens is a fantastic inspiration
for us all, and you should go there as much as possible
and support them 'cause they're great.
[all laugh]
Here's an example of the sedges
acting as a background plant.
You can see 'em kind of tumbling out in the front.
They have that beautiful, flowing texture.
And then, you have this blooming big-leaf aster
that is, like, popping above it and providing floral interest.
The cool thing here is that you have two plants
that are looking really good,
which is your sedges and your asters,
and then you don't even notice that in the background
is some columbine that finished blooming in May.
When you plant a lot of plants and you plant them densely,
you can appreciate each plant as it's at its best.
And then, when it fades to the back,
you're not just looking at nothing
but that plant in a sea of mulch.
This is a really amazing garden at Olbrich.
I had absolutely nothing to do with this.
But again, our theory about short plants and filling in
and a background is being borne out.
They have a dense planting here.
They have some fantastic sedges or grasses
providing that nice, cool background.
And then, we have beautiful flowers intermingling,
finding their way through it,
reseeding and spreading as they want to,
taking center stage when they're in bloom,
and then fading to the background
and letting the sedges do the hard work when they're not.
This is a fantastic garden.
You should all go to Olbrich this year.
Which leads us to my garden.
[drums hands]
Ah, so the other thing I wanna note is that, in my business,
I work really hard to do a good job
and I try to make choices that I know are going to work well.
And the way that I learn what choices might work well
is I try things in my garden and I see if they work or not.
So, it's more valuable for me as a native plant gardener
to have this garden that teaches me things
than to have a garden that looks good.
So...
[all laugh]
This is the first garden.
We bought this house, we bought this house.
I said, "Oh, boy, there's a lot of shade here."
And I said, "The grass doesn't even grow in this corner.
And you can see that the grass doesn't grow
because in my adjacent neighbor's yard--
you might not be able to see
'cause the slide's kind of dark-- the grass isn't growing.
He has some bare dirt there.
So, I got an arborist to give me a bunch of chips,
and I got a bunch of cardboard from my husband's job,
and I laboriously tore every single piece of tape
off of the cardboard,
and, boy, is there a lot of tape on that cardboard.
And then, I spread the seeds-- the mulch.
And then, in the spring,
from the beautiful and wonderful Plant Dane native-plant sale,
I purchased these plants.
And the first thing we're gonna notice
is this is a really big space,
and this isn't actually that many plants.
[audience laughs]
So, I took these plants and I walked in my backyard
and I said, "I got to put these somewhere."
And for some inexplicable and baffling reason,
'cause I had no idea what I was doing,
I took my sedges and I planted them by my Norway maple,
and then I took my forbs and I planted them somewhere else.
I planted, in this little corner garden that you can see,
I planted 24 sedges of 3 species.
This is May 2022.
August 2022.
Here's what to expect from a first-year native plant garden.
Nothing!
They didn't do anything. [audience laughs]
They didn't grow.
May 2023.
Okay, they're already getting a bit bigger.
That's nice.
It's looking a little, I don't know,
there's a lot of, there's a lot of sedges here.
[laughs]
July 2023, still growing a little bit.
That's great.
July 2024.
Ooh, we actually have jumped one year here.
We'll come back to this.
I had a baby in this year,
which is another thing I would recommend you not do
if you care about gardening. [all laugh]
July 2023.
Jump forward a year, July 2024.
My sedges are bigger.
These are now third-year plants.
There's that-- Everybody's heard it.
Leap, sleep, sleep, sleep-- sleep, creep, leap.
- Attendee 4: Sleep, creep.
- Melissa: Or just sleep all the time.
July 2024, my plants have leapt.
August 2025, my sedges are even bigger.
Some of my sedges of those three sedge species--
Actually, one of them is a full-sun sedge.
It is Carex vulpinoidea.
And it has faded to the background
because it is quite unhappy with the dense shade
under my Norway maple.
But two fantastic sedges that I planted here,
Carex sprengelii, the long-beaked sedge,
and Carex brevior, the plains oval sedge,
less ornamental, less recommended,
still a decent sedge for shade.
They're not unhappy.
Unfortunately, this garden still doesn't look good
because all I planted here were sedges. [audience laughs]
Which brings me to my lessons learned.
Plant flowers too. [all laugh]
Plant flowers.
If I had taken all of those 80 plants
and I had put all of them by this tree in this spot,
yeah, I would have had a lot of mulch in other places,
but this spot would have looked really good.
This spot, the plants would have, like, grown
and established and started intertwining.
I didn't do that.
I'll probably-- Maybe I'll do that this year.
The other lesson learned is that I prepped this site
with cardboard and mulch.
You have to do something with your site
unless it is bare dirt.
And what you have to do depends on what's growing there.
So, if you have a site and you have grass,
you have a pretty benign mix.
If you have a site and you have goutweed,
this is like a really complicated topic,
but, like, you have to know what's growing there
and you have to know how to mitigate it.
So, first identify what you have
and then figure out what to do with it
'cause some plants are harder to deal with than others.
But if you have simple plants,
cardboard and mulch is a great site prep method.
Unfortunately, it does stop your plants from reseeding
because mulch-- Seeds can't germinate in mulch.
They can only germinate in dirt.
Or it's a lot harder for them to germinate in mulch.
So, I like this site prep method because it was cheap,
it was easy, the materials were uncomplicated.
I just had to move them.
I didn't have to disturb the soil.
I didn't add any chemicals to the soil.
That was awesome.
The downside is it has kept my sedges
from turning into more sedges,
which I do really want them to do.
It's also more labor intensive.
If you have any sort of, like, mobility issue,
moving wheelbarrows full of mulch
to your backyard might be off the table,
and you might not want to use this.
You also have to plant pregrown plants.
So far, we've talked only about pregrown plants
because that's the simplest way
to establish a shade garden, unfortunately.
So, with mulch,
because seeds don't germinate in mulch,
you have to start with these pregrown plants.
The downside to pregrown plants
is that they are kind of expensive.
So, I, instead of going to that garden
and then making it look good by putting more plants in,
I started a new project in the front of my house.
This is May 2023.
I once again went with the cardboard and mulch
because it's easy and the materials are available
and it feels like a really safe choice.
Spread a lot of cardboard, spread a lot of mulch.
And I planted some plants.
I actually planted this in July.
So, [laughs] this May 2023 slide that you see,
this is like a quarter of the plants that I planted.
Here, in September 2023, I've planted a lot more plants.
And you can plant native plants--
These things are so hardy,
you can plant them at any time of the year.
You can plant them in July, you can plant them in August.
You just have to water them.
Water them, you don't have to water 'em a ton.
I have really clay-heavy soil,
and the mulch kind of keeps the plants damp.
So, I water, like, once per week.
If you have a drier site,
if you're noticing that the soil is getting drier really quickly,
I would water more often.
The year that I had my second baby,
the plants received often no water after I planted them.
And I'm not saying that I would recommend
the "plant and then hope" approach,
the "plant and then comfort your crying child" approach,
but I did have, like, 80% survival on the plants
that I planted and then only watered zero to one times.
[audience laughs]
Not professional advice. [laughs]
May 2024, back to the slides.
Hey, it didn't do much in the first year,
but in the second year, you can see it's doing something.
My sedges are getting bigger, my other plants are coming in.
June 2024, I have some flowers.
This is Penstemon digitalis.
Everybody's gonna recommend this plant
'cause it's a great plant.
It's a heliophily of 7, so I don't know.
I don't really understand anything about plants.
It does okay in my shade gardens.
As long as it's not too shady, the Penstemon,
the Penstemon digitalis does okay.
So, here's Penstemon digitalis blooming in the front.
The nonnative Jacob's ladder is blooming.
Just pretend that's not there. [audience laughs]
July 2024.
Again, it's bigger than the first year.
It's not looking fantastic, but it's bigger.
And you can see here, I included a lot more sedges,
so I have more of a background going on.
I probably planted one plant per square foot in this.
August 2024, okay.
May 2025.
Already the plants in this May are bigger
than they were last May,
so just expect your plants to take a long time to establish
and to really, like, show their true selves.
My Jacob's ladder is blooming,
if you can see those little blue blooms.
Fantastic plant.
My other plants are looking good.
May is a month that this looks really good.
June is a month that this garden actually looks decent too.
It's growing in, there's some bare spots.
There's definitely places
where I need to put in more plants or more sedges.
But overall, not bad.
We have a kind of a, at this point,
nice overall height.
Stuff hasn't grown really tall yet.
My sedges are there, they're looking good.
Ooh.
And then we get to September 2025.
And one thing that I did here was I--
I had plants that I grew from seed,
and I planted them in this yard
knowing that they weren't a good choice.
And the plants that I planted were Monarda fistulosa,
the common bee balm, and Virginia anemone,
which was a bit more of an experiment.
And both of these plants grow tall when they're flowering.
They get to be, like, this tall.
And instead of being a plant that gets to be, like, this tall
and is, like, this wide,
they're plants that get to be about this tall,
and they're also about this wide.
So, the single flower stalks of my Monarda fistulosa
and my Anemone virginiana look terrible in this garden,
and I actually have cut back most of them in this picture
because it looked so bad to have a relatively narrow--
This is like, I don't know, 12 feet at its widest point,
which is in the opposite side of the picture.
It's probably, like, eight feet wide here, six feet wide.
It's not that wide.
If you have a narrow, small bed,
keeping the height constrained is going to look better.
Other lessons learned from this.
Hey, it has a lot of sedges in it.
That's a positive.
It also has a lot of bare spots
where I was too optimistic
with the sun requirements of my plants,
and the plants didn't-- They died.
So, be realistic about your sun requirements.
I also went into this garden with a plan.
I had a curated plant list, and I planted that.
And then, the next spring,
I would have a couple plants left over
from a client project, and I would put 'em in,
and I'd have a couple plants left over from a client project,
and I'd put 'em in, and then I'd order a couple plants
'cause they looked interesting, and I'd put 'em in.
So, I kind of ended up throwing the kitchen sink at this garden
instead of sticking with my initial plan.
And it has ended up looking like a garden
that somebody has thrown the kitchen sink at,
unfortunately. [audience laughs]
This is-- which brings me to a really important point
about native plant gardens that I've kind of touched on,
which is that they are disappointing.
They are just fundamentally-- Someone very wise told me this,
and they are fundamentally disappointing.
They just, you want them to--
I always want them to do more than they're doing.
I want my plants to establish faster.
I want more flowers.
I wanna be able to plant more stuff here.
I want this plant to do better.
I wanna see more bees.
I want it to become this, like, wild and chaotic
and beautiful life-filled space,
and instead, it kind of just does its thing.
So, just be ready to be continually disappointed.
[audience laughs] And...
Which sounds bad!
It sounds bad as the native plant person.
But the reality is, is that I love this garden so much.
My kids play outside all the time
and this garden is right where they play,
and I spend so much time looking at this garden.
I love to look in the mulch and see if anything sprouted.
I like to see how my wild strawberry is spreading.
I love to see-- I had giant pollinating wasps.
They're super peaceful, they're really cool.
I had those coming to the flowers
for part of this garden--
in this garden for part of the year.
I was constantly delighted with something
that was happening in this garden,
and this garden is ugly and it is in front of my house,
and it's really disappointing.
Okay, so... [laughs]
September 2023.
I had another plan, and here, I took all of my lessons
learned from that, and I spread more cardboard and mulch,
and I-- ooh.
[audience laughs]
Don't have a-- Don't plan
a really ambitious garden project
and then have a baby in March.
So, I managed to get all my plants planted.
This is probably 400 square feet or so.
And I planted probably, like, 360 plants in here.
So, I planted a lot of plants.
And in July 2024, it's starting to establish.
Again, it's not really doing much.
This is the first year,
but, like, my plants are there and they're growing.
August 2024, things have grown a little.
April 2025.
Stuff is looking about as good as it did in July,
which is actually pretty good for April.
May 2025.
There's that baby crawling on a fence.
He's walking around now.
And you can see, again,
I have a nice background of sedges.
They're well-distributed.
I have my forbs that are-- My forbs, sorry,
my flowers that I am hoping will kind of intersperse
and provide interest and stick up above.
June 2025.
The vision's kind of, like, we're kind of coming together.
I kept this planting really restrained specieswise.
So, July 2025.
This is only a second-year garden,
but you can see, there's my background of sedges.
There's my hairy wood mint poking above the other plants.
There's asters and goldenrods in this garden,
ready to kind of take over
when the hairy wood mint fades to the back,
which you can't see in this,
because another lesson learned from this garden
is that if you have asters, which you should,
you have to protect them from rabbits
because rabbits love to eat asters.
So, you can put up a fence.
I do, like, a one-foot chicken wire fence.
You can experiment with those, like, rabbit-repelling granules,
which I haven't done 'cause I think they're probably a scam,
but, like, maybe they actually work.
I don't know, is it worth $40 to find out?
You can plant your sedge-- your rabbit--
your delicious plants surrounded by sedges or other plants
that the rabbits won't eat.
So, the asters in here
that are surrounded by sedges are actually doing okay.
The asters in here that are on their own
have gotten continually eaten by the rabbits,
and they've stayed really small.
So, just remember that you're gonna have to do something
to protect your asters from rabbits.
What other lessons learned from this garden?
I wish I'd planted more species.
I wish that I'd kind of branched out a little bit.
I planted one aster and I planted one goldenrod.
This is actually a pretty big garden.
I kind of wish I'd planted two aster species just so that,
you know, the asters all bloom at different times.
Some of them bloom in August, some of them bloom in October.
If you plant more of them,
you get more flowers for a wider period.
I wish I'd planted some of those harder-to-grow plants.
I'll probably get some bare-root plants this year
and put those in,
'cause those can provide some really good interest
beyond the plants that are easy to find.
What else on this garden?
Once again, the mulch is kind of keeping my stuff from reseeding.
Ugh, I'm not obsessed with that, but it is what it is.
And I wish I'd planted two sedges
as my background matrix here.
I went with only Carex sprengelii,
but like I said, this is a big space
and it could have used that variation in height
and the variation in color and texture
that would have come from multiple sedges.
So, if you have a big site,
if you have a tall element in your site,
like a tree, don't be afraid to, like,
maybe plant some taller stuff by the tree
to introduce a little more height variation
and break our rule about low plants.
Maybe include a few more species
just to, like, get a little bit more excitement going in there.
But overall, I went into this garden with a better plan,
I planted my plants more densely,
and it's actually turning out pretty good.
I'm really excited to see how this goes this year.
The next adventure is we'll-- So, come back to this talk
in, like, five years, and we'll give you an update on this.
[all laugh]
Always in search of a crazy new thing to do.
I killed the grass with herbicide in this patch.
I designed my own custom shade seed mix,
and I have seeded all of this with native shade species.
A note on starting from seed, 'cause like I said,
we have only talked about planting pregrown plants.
I have not found a shady seed mix
that I think meets the aesthetic requirements
that a homeowner has.
There are shady seed mixes that work really well
for ecological reconstruction,
where you don't care so much how it looks,
you just want a robust community of native plants.
I haven't found one that only has species
that look good in the garden.
So, unfortunately, if you find a shady seed mix
that you think looks really good, you should try it.
Or if you're not super concerned about, like, how it looks,
you could try it.
But I don't know that I have a good shady seed mix
that I would recommend, which is too bad,
'cause if you use herbicide for your site prep
and you use a seed mix for your plants,
you can establish 1,000 square feet
of native plant garden for, like, $150.
It doesn't get cheaper than that, if money is a concern.
Which brings us to site prep herbicide.
Positives, it's easy, it's cheap,
it's quick, it's effective.
You can seed into it, or you can plant pregrown plugs.
You don't have to do a lot of moving stuff.
So, if you have a physical limitation,
it's just easier on your body.
I would recommend look at the label.
The label is the law on herbicide.
You have to follow the label instructions
when applying an herbicide.
And I would always wear appropriate PPE.
Look for a product that has one active ingredient
so that you can better understand the risks.
I used glyphosate only, not because I thought
that it was a completely safe thing to apply,
but because I understood the risks
and how it would break down in the soil.
Once you have three ingredients in your herbicide,
you need to understand and be like,
feel good about each of those,
or feel, I don't know, feel at least halfway okay.
So, downsides, concerns about environmental toxicity.
I already talked about that.
The other site prep method you can use is a sod cutter.
This is a fine way to do it.
There's manual and there's gas-powered sod cutters.
I have used both.
I actually prefer the manual sod cutter.
I'm not a super muscley person.
The gas-powered sod cutter is quite heavy.
The manual sod cutter, I thought, was easy to use.
I didn't find it was hard on my body.
It did not make me sore at all.
So, feel free to experiment.
It also was easier to navigate if you wanna do a curve,
'cause the gas-powered sod cutter is just, like, choo,
and the manual one, you can actually, like, move.
The downside...
The upside-- It's quick.
The manual one was easier to use.
You can seed into the exposed soil
and you're not putting chemicals in the soil.
The downside is it removes a lot of organic material.
You have to dispose of the cut sod.
And if you have 1,000 square feet of sod
that you have cut, you actually have a whole lot of sod,
and you have to laboriously carry it somewhere.
And if you don't have a good site on your property,
you have to take it somewhere in your vehicle,
and you can't take it to the composting sites
'cause they won't take it
because of concerns about jumping worms.
So, the only place that I know of to take it is the landfill.
[audience murmurs]
So, that's kind of the up and down on the sod cutter.
Plastic sheeting is another site prep method.
You put the plastic sheeting on, you'll kills the stuff,
you take it off, stuff germinates.
You put it on, kills stuff, take it off, stuff germinates.
I haven't actually done this personally.
It takes an entire summer,
so often, it just doesn't align with my very impatient timeline.
The plastic might break down
and put microplastics in the soil.
It also won't kill the more aggressive plants
you have in your garden.
If you have, like, goutweed, something really nasty,
the goutweed might just laugh at it.
It also might, I'm not sure about this,
but if the heating up of the plastic
and the heating up of the soil is a key way that this works,
a shady site might not work as well.
So, you can try plastic sheeting if this appeals to you.
I would recommend that you do more research into how to do it.
I am not an expert.
It is one of the tools in our toolbox.
And that... is the end of my presentation.
[audience applauds]