VIBRANT PLANT COMBINATIONS FOR A SHADE GARDEN

See more of Chen’s collection of Dicentra including:

Dicentra ‘Stuart Boothman’ which is pictured above and?has pale pink flowers and greyish foliage.

Dicentra ‘Aurora’ A good reliable creamy white dwarf Dicentra.

Dicenta ‘Bleeding Hearts’?Chen writes, “This is probably the most showy Dicentra, although it is not vigorous in my garden. I have lost 2 trials mostly because of vole problems.”

Plant Combination: Brunnera ‘Jack Frost’?(left) with Heuchera ‘Silver Scroll’?(in the foreground) and Hosta ‘Fire and Ice’ (in the upper right).

What’s nice about this combination: Both the Brunnera and the Heuchera have silver foliage, but they couldn’t be more different or more complimentary. The cream of the hosta’s foliage adds that all important element of contrast.

 

Plant Combination: On the right is Pulmonaria longifolia ‘Diana Clare’ and to the bottom left is a deciduous?rhododendron:?Rhododendron schlippenbach which the “rabbits like to chew on”. Above them is a hosta with a lots of cream trough the centre of its dark green foliage.

What’s nice about this combination: I would particularly like to?draw to your attention to the silvered-grey-green Pulmonaria. Chen notes that:

“The quiet beauty of Pulmonarias is indispensable for the shady parts of my garden. The flowers may be early and brief, but their foliage is highly ornamental from early spring into late fall. In mid-summer they typically go through a decline, but this can easily be taken care of by removing their foliage. New foliage will emerge, and be ready, as the weather is cooling off.

They appear to self-sow readily (but not wildly) in my garden. This presents a problem for keeping the named cultivars intact after a few years. I suspect that many Pulmonarias on the market are just derivative seedlings of some kind. For the same reason, many name cultivars are not that distinct from each other.”