Shade Gardening Books

Books to help you bring color to the dark side of the garden.

By visiting and buying from our associates you help defray costs to keep Rainy Side Gardeners online. Thank you for your continued support of this web site.

The American Woodland Garden:
Capturing the Spirit of the Deciduous Forest

Book Description: In his unique and often thought-provoking new book, award-winning author Rick Darke promotes and stunningly illustrates a garden aesthetic based on the strengths and opportunities of the woodland, including play of light, sound, and scent; seasonal drama; and the architectural interest of woody plants.

An Encyclopedia of Shade Perennials

Book Description: This encyclopedia provides information on more than 7000 species and cultivars in 184 genera, from Acanthus to Woodwardia—some new to horticulture, others unjustly overlooked, but all beautifully suited to the shade garden.

Schmid has half a century of gardening experience behind him; readers are therefore treated to both practical growing tips and his personal associations with the plants. The text is rounded out with 500 color photographs, many taken by the author himself.

Beth Chatto's Woodland Garden:
Shade-Loving Plants for Year-Round Interest

Book Description: A legendary gardener takes us on an intimate tour of her verdant English woodland garden, revealing a horticultural landscape of planting in dry shade. Offering a wealth of practical inspiration and a palette of more than 200 plants adapted by nature to flourish in the shade, this gardener's companion highlights the transformation of a barren derelict site into a woodland garden where a maze of paths with lush plants thrive throughout the year. With an unrivalled knowledge of plants, an artist's eye for color, form, and shape, plus over forty years of gardening experience, Chatto shows how the challenge of planting in the shade can be an opportunity that every gardener will want to emulate. Written in an engagingly warm personal style and handsomely illustrated throughout with lavish color photographs, it shows you how your greatest gardening challenge can become your gardening triumph.

The Complete Shade Gardener

Book Description: This classic reference is now back in print. Long considered required reading for those with difficult low-light areas, it covers the basics from the ground up, leading the gardener through the creation of a shady retreat. Schenk's writing is casual, to the point, and often humorous. The sago palm, for example, "will put you in touch with paleobotany." Selected photographs and line drawings both illustrate and inspire.

Got Shade?
A "Take It Easy" Approach for Today's Gardener

Book Description: Whether it’s urban, suburban, or rural, nearly every property has some shade, if only on the north side of the house. Countless more are "blessed" with giant trees planted decades ago that screen out the sunlight. Under such conditions, you may think that it’s impossible to have an interesting garden without a lot of work. Not so if you are willing to learn about the plethora of easygoing horticultural gems that don’t require full sun.

Most gardeners think only of impatiens and hostas for their shady areas, but shade gardening can be far more interesting, and even exciting—and you need not work too hard at it if you incorporate some lesser-known but easy-to-grow plants into your landscape. Judiciously mixing the common plants with the more unusual ones can help the busy, tired, or lazy gardener create a special and unique retreat.

Carolyn Harstad, author of the best-selling Go Native!, organizes this book around the principle that an interesting shade garden is well balanced and has a variety of plantings. Early chapters focus on designing the low-maintenance garden. Further chapters discuss small trees, shrubs, dwarf conifers, vines, ground covers, ferns, grasses, perennials, woodland wildflowers, spring bulbs, and annuals (yes, there are annuals that enjoy shade!).

She discusses hundreds of shade-tolerant plants hardy in Zones 4-8, suggests how they may be used and combined, and recommends methods to reduce garden maintenance—a universal concern in this fast-paced world. With its informative text, accurate drawings, and colorful photographs, this book is a "must have" for gardeners across much of North America.

Making the Most of Shade:
How to Plan, Plant, and Grow a Fabulous Garden that Lightens up the Shadows

Book Description: A gorgeous celebration of the shade garden-featuring nearly 300 perennials, annuals, bulbs, ferns, ornamental grasses, and climbing plants that will thrive without direct sunlight. A shaded garden can be a soothing sanctuary that even the most dedicated sun worshipper can welcome on a hot summer day. But how do you get plants to grow in a spot where trees and shrubs hide the sun? In this stunning volume, garden expert Larry Hodgson shows how to create a lush and lovely garden filled with plants that will flourish in the shade. "I can think of no better book than Making the Most of Shade by Larry Hodgson. One the stars of the gardening scene in Quebec, Hodgson has been a popular freelance garden writer for years. His book features more than 200 top-performance shade plants and gives very practical growing tips as well as Hodgson's personal observations of each plant. -- The Vancouver Sun Hodgsons new book Making the Most of Shade is a fine example of good research coupled with lots of hands-on experienceit is a wonderful book. -- The Gazette Books such as this should be required reading before hitting the garden stores. -- The Province "Not only does this guidebook tell you how to grow in the shade, it profiles the plants you'll need, when to plant them, bloom colour, bloom duration, height and soil preference. It can also turn any amateur into an old pro with plant pronunciations (quick, how do you say euonymus? -- yew-ON-i-mus).

Moss Gardening:
Including Lichens, Liverworts, and Other Miniatures

A delightful book that encourages gardeners to pay closer attention to the subtle beauty of miniature landscapes and introduces one of the glories of Japanese gardens into American designs. The author writes entertainingly of mosses on rocks and walls, in containers, and as a lush ground cover, and he presents a gallery of his favorite moss species.

Natural Shade Garden

From Amazon.com: Shade can be a gardener's curse or delight, depending on how it's managed. Even a heavy grove of mature trees needn't have bare ground beneath; they can be surrounded with any number of shade-loving foliage, grasses, or grasslike ground covers, including galax, dichondra, ivy, vinca, wintergreen, maidenhair fern... the list of possibilities is a long one. Druse himself gardens in the shadow of a Brooklyn brownstone, so his advice is by no means limited to gardeners with woodland acreage. This book also successfully punctures the myth that a shady flower garden must be colored in greens and subtle pastels: a parade of brilliant camellias, columbines, clematis, and primula proves that a shade gardener's crayon box is as varied as any, and the well-organized Druse sorts the herbaceous perennials by color in an addendum at the back of the book.

Shade:
Planting Solutions for Shady Gardens

Book Description: Shade is a reality in nearly every garden, and this guide will help any gardener, experienced or inexperienced, take full advantage of those sometimes tricky shady areas. After looking at shade in different situations—in different sizes and types of gardens, in specific areas within the garden such as hedges and other barriers, and in vertical elements such as pergolas and arches—the book then considers the characteristics of shade-loving plants, looking at brightly colored flowers as well as at plants with distinct types of foliage. Readers will also learn how to use plant companions to create striking designs in addition to the practicalities of preparing, planting, and maintaining a shade garden.

Shady Retreats:
20 Plans for Colorful, Private Spaces in Your Backyard

Book Description: Most flowers and vegetables love the sun, but the gardeners who tend them crave the shade. A comfortable hammock strung between two trees. A set of Adirondack chairs arranged for conversation beneath a vine-covered arbor. A stone bench tucked into a quiet nook. These out-of-the-way outdoor retreats provide busy gardeners with cool relief from the hot sun, as well as precious hours of quiet, privacy, and peace.

In SHADY RETREATS, lifelong gardener Barbara W. Ellis provides detailed plans for 20 gardens with shade as the theme. Each design includes easy-to-read blueprints and a glorious oil painting of what the garden will look like. Ellis also provides specific plant lists; suggestions on how to bring color into the shade; and practical advice on how to use shrubs, trees, vines, and man-made structures to create attractive, inviting, shady sanctuaries in any garden or yard.

The garden design concepts are easy for even novices to grasp, and experienced gardeners will appreciate the unique inspirations and down-to-earth advice on how to adapt the concept of the shady retreat to fit their own garden's configuration. Complete with suggestions on how to use gazebos, containers, fountains, and other garden ornaments, plus an encyclopedia of approximately 100 shade-loving plants, Shady Retreats is an easy-to-use handbook that helps even beginning gardeners make the move out of the house and into a cool, inviting outdoor sanctuary.

Timber Press Pocket Guide to Shade Perennials

Book Description Shady corners in gardens, long considered difficult sites, provide superb growing conditions for hundreds of unique and diverse plants, including some with gorgeous flowers. Moving beyond the traditional hostas and ferns, the Timber Press Pocket Guide to Shade Perennials provides descriptions of more than 1000 readily available species and cultivars that will enliven and thrive in the shade garden. The accessible text, illustrated with 310 photographs, includes definitions of shade intensities, basic information on cultivation, maintenance, and pests and diseases as well as lists of plants for specific landscape uses. The convenient format makes this pocket guide an ideal reference for taking to the nursery or garden center.

The Woodland Garden:
Planting in Harmony with Nature

Book Description: Updated and revised. This book is both a valuable reference and a practical how-to guide to hundreds of plant species suited for cultivation beneath a canopy of mature trees. Here is all the information needed to get started: design, plant selection, planting and maintenance. These principles can be applied anywhere in North America in any size garden, from large estate to a cramped city lot.

This revised edition of The Woodland Garden features new, beautiful color images throughout, a larger format and more text.

An authoritative guide for gardeners and landscape designers, this edition focuses on:

Designing the woodland garden
Building the woodland garden
The canopy, plus a list of woodland trees
The understory, plus a list of woodland shrubs
Plants of the woodland floor
Climbing plants
Planting, pruning and maintenance

The authors list their favorite plants with detailed descriptions of the best woodland garden performers including lilies and rhododendrons. Practical information is provided for soil characteristics, adapting a property, working with a new site and converting an old garden. There are sections on fragrance, water, rocks, pathways, scale and unity, how to analyze a site and much more.

Helpful tips throughout offer useful advice gleaned from the authors' decades of collective experience: dealing with weeds and pests, preparing the land, watering, mulching and propagation.

Tell a friend about this page!

This page was last modified:

Not finding the book you are looking for? Try the search box below.