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Hi I'm Scott Reil and on behalf of expertvillage.com I'm going to talk to you about perennial gardens.
When looking for perennials for the shade garden we got to take a couple of things into
consideration. First plants that grow in the shade don't necessarily relyon a lot of flowers
to get their selves pollinated and really that is the only reason that flowers have
flowers on them. It is to attract the bees to get their selves pollinated, most of the
plants in the shade garden find different things to do it. So we don't have as much
flower power to rely on so it is up to use to look at maybe more the form and the shapes
and contrast those back and forth to make our garden interesting. This little venusta
right here is a good example I have used in this case variegation on the venusta to add
two or three different colors to just this one plant alone. And this nice low horizontal
has been contrasted nicely with a fern right behind more a vertical. One has a very solid
leaf, one has a very airy leaf that is going to give you a big contrast between the vertical,
airy, and horizontal and the solid. You see that we have done this again over here with
a different fern this is Japanese painted fern and in the Japanese painted fern we used
a little bit of reddish color combination here. So now we are starting to pick up some
of the reds that we find here on the bird bath moving it down here with the whites that
we also see here. So as well as complementing and contrasting we are adding the same colors.
Now another nice thing to be doing in the shade is a lot of our wooden flowers and this
little guy peaking out beneath the hosta here is rectifolia not a chewing amity. But the
shade border often gives us a change to get some of these native wooden flowers that we
would not see that often not even in the woods and move them to our garden. Remember don't
be taking them from the woods let's leave them for everybody to share but good gardens
are more and more have wonderful woodland flowers that you can plant and the shade garden
are a great place for them.