CAROLYN'S SHADE GARDENS

At Carolyn’s Shade Gardens, the landscape provides ornamental interest 365 days a year.  To make this happen, I expect most trees and shrubs to have at least two ornamental qualities peaking at different times before they are given precious garden space.  Ornamental interest can come from flowers, fruit, bark, leaves, habit, texture, and fall color.  Brightly colored fall leaves are a wonderful way to extend your garden’s interest through November.  Some of my favorite fall foliage stars are profiled below.      

Nursery News: Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a retail nursery located in Bryn Mawr, PA, specializing in showy, colorful, and unusual plants for shade.  The only plants that we ship are snowdrops and miniature hostas.  For catalogues and announcements of events, please send your full name, location, and phone number (for back up use only) to carolyn@carolynsshadegardens.com.  Click here to get to the home page of our website for catalogues and information about our nursery and to subscribe to our blog.

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Native oakleaf hydrangeas turn beautiful shades of red and then burgundy over a long period of time.  The leaves in the upper left of the photo are still green while the foliage in the upper right is deep burgundy.  I also grow oakleaf hydrangea for its fresh and dried flowers, peeling bark, unusually shaped large leaves, walnut and dry shade tolerance, and tropical texture.  It is a true four-season star.

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Plants in the witch hazel family often have elegant leaves and beautiful fall colors, and winter hazel, Corylopsis, is no exception.  Here it is surrounded by ‘All Gold’ Japanese hakone grass.

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The lovely purple spots on the leaves of ‘Katherine Adele’ hardy geranium darken as the fall progresses.  In mid-November, as other perennials go dormant around it, ‘Katherine Adele’ fills out and reaches an ornamental peak.  I also grow it for its pretty pink flowers in spring.  However, I grow many varieties of hardy geranium and this variety is the worst for self-sowing, and the seedlings are hard to remove.

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‘Mohawk’ viburnum resulted from a cross between Burkwood hybrid and Korean spicebush viburnums.  It is a medium-sized shrub with elegant and highly fragrant flowers.  ‘Mohawk’, a Pennsylvania Horticultural Society gold medal winner, is particularly treasured for its stunning and log-lasting fall color.  I also love the rose-red buds that precede the white flowers in April.

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My grove of native pawpaws turns a beautiful yellow in the fall.  Very easy to grow, pawpaws produce an abundance of edible fruit with a taste and texture resembling banana-mango-pineapple custard.  Fruit production is enhanced by planting two different cultivars.

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Native flowering dogwood, on the left above, turns a gorgeous red in the fall.  Its flowers, fruit, bark, and habit are also highly ornamental. 

Witch hazels have a very unique yellow-orange fall color that stands out in the landscape.  ‘Angelly’, on the right above, is my favorite witch hazel because of its striking, bright yellow, spring flowers, which made my choice easy when I was confronted with a greenhouse full of hundreds of witch hazels in bloom.  ‘Angelly’s’ flowers stood out.   It also has the crucial ability to shed its old leaves.  Witch hazel flowers blooming among hundreds of old brown leaves are not attractive and removing the leaves by hand is a chore.

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Another perennial that comes into its own in the fall is Ruby Glow euphorbia or wood spurge.  The leaves and stems darken as the season progresses and are much more purple now than when I took this photo on November 7.  I also value Ruby Glow for its unusual chartreuse flowers in spring and its upright, shrub-like habit.  Although its common name is wood spurge, it prefers a sunny location.

Japanese maples have stunning fall color very late in the fall foliage season.  They can self sow prolifically and have sometimes been called invasive.  This tree was a seedling that appeared in my garden in the right place at the right time.  In the lower right of the photo are the beautiful yellow leaves of native ‘Forest Pansy’ redbud.

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Generally unselected Japanese maples have red fall color.  However, I prefer the seedlings that have yellow or orange foliage in fall.  The above seedling growing out of the side of a giant London plane tree in my nursery sales area has multi-colored leaves.

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If you are considering adding a Japanese maple to your garden, you can choose from the hundreds of cultivars selected from Acer palmatum.  The variety of sizes, leaf shapes, habits, fall colors, etc., available is amazing.  Pictured above and at the top of the post is ‘Shishigashira’ or lion’s head Japanese maple, one of my favorites.  It is under-planted with ‘Shell Pink’ lamium and fall-blooming hardy cyclamen, fall stars in their own right.

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I will end this post with a photo of three spectacular native plants.  The taller tree is yellowwood, valued as a medium-sized shade tree with beautiful, fragrant flowers and striking yellow fall color.  The small tree is a flowering dogwood discussed earlier in the post.  The shrub with the orange fall color is a flame azalea, one of our stunning native deciduous rhododendrons.

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Carolyn