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.
The entrance to the gardens from the nursery is down these stone stairs because a lot of the property is on the side of a south-facing hill.
I haven’t posted in a while due to technical difficulties. I recently bought a “new iPad” and was very excited about using it to compose a post with long shots of my garden. My current camera is great for macro shots but not very good for landscape photos. The new iPad reportedly has a very good camera so I thought I would take a lot of long shots to satisfy all my readers who have been asking to see the big picture of my garden. Unfortunately I have found the WordPress app that is supposed to coordinate the iPad with WordPress to be challenging—at least for this technologically unsavvy blogger.
A view of the bed along the steps from the nursery to the main terrace.
Giving up on the idea of actually posting from the iPad, I downloaded the iPad photos to my PC. Another touted feature of the new iPad is even higher quality screen resolution. That means, as I discovered, that the photos look fabulous on my iPad but pretty ordinary on my PC. But having come this far, I am going ahead with the long view garden tour. I hope you are all viewing it on an iPad and will think I am an incredible photographer. For those of you on a “normal” computer, please don’t tell.
On the way down the stairs, we passed by the rock garden terrace and landed on the main terrace by the front door. You are looking to the left towards the door.
Looking from the front door out towards the same beds.
Looking to the right towards the other end of the main terrace.
A wider view of the right end of the main terrace by the front door.
Looking from the main terrace back up the hill towards the rock garden terrace, which really shines in early spring but still looks nice now.
The view from the main terrace down to the bottom terrace and beyond.
The stairs from the main terrace to the bottom terrace. Most of the flowers on this level are orange and purple.
The left side of the bottom terrace.
The right side of the bottom terrace.
Another view of the right side of the bottom terrace.
A closer view
The view from the bottom terrace down to the raised bed area where the birdhouse resides.
The stairs down to the next level.
The raised bed area was built as a vegetable garden but converted to hellebore beds when deer overran our property. It is currently being reclaimed for fruit and vegetables now that we have a deer fence.
Below the raised beds is what we call the dry shade garden under an American hornbeam. It is filled with roots and not much rain gets through the leaves. Beyond this garden is lawn until you get to my production beds where I grow plants to sell at the nursery.
A close up of the dry shade garden.
Looking from the dry shade garden back up the hill.
That’s the tour of the gardens going down the hill on the west side of the house. It is the sunniest area of my property—the real shade gardens are in the back. You will have to wait for part two to see those.
Carolyn
Nursery Happenings: We will be at the Bryn Mawr Farmer’s Market this Saturday, June 9, from 9 am to 1 pm. The following weekend we will have our final open hours at the nursery. We close on June 17 until September. Customers on my email list will receive an email with details. If you are interested in receiving miniature hostas mail order, click here.
If you are within visiting distance and would like to receive catalogues and information about customer events, please send your full name and phone number to carolynsshadegardens@verizon.net. Subscribing to my blog does not sign you up to receive this information.
Facebook: Carolyn’s Shade Gardens has a Facebook page where I post single photos, garden tips, and other information that doesn’t fit into a blog post. You can look at my Facebook page here or click the Like button on my right sidebar here.
Notes: Every word that appears in orange on my blog is a link that you can click for more information. If you want to return to my blog’s homepage to access the sidebar information (catalogues, previous articles, etc.) or to subscribe to my blog, just click here.
CAROLYN'S SHADE GARDENS 