Five Ways to Add Color to Your Native Shade Garden

I used to think of woodland gardens as boring and lacking in color.  But you can have lots of color in your woodland shade garden.  Here are five ways you can add showy and colorful plants that love dry shade.

1) You can't just plant one plant and expect a showy display of color. You will need to plant five to seven plants close together to create a large patch of showy color in your woodland area. 

2) Add a lot of compost to mix with your dry soil and a lot of patience.  It will take two to three years for these showy and colorful shade plants to mature.  

3) It is important to know which plants to use for dry shade. You can start off with the worst possible soil underneath trees, devoid of moisture, nutrients and with a lot of compost, you can still have a fantastic shade garden.

4) Native plants growing in the wild tend to do so in large sweeps of a single plant.  Try to recreate this in your woodland garden to get the best display of color payoff. 

5) Here are several native shade plants that are ideal for woodland gardens: Blue Creeping Phlox (Phlox Stolonifera), Bleeding Hearts (Dicentra formosa), and Appalachian False Goatsbeard (Astilbe biternata).