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Tag: Geraniums

  • Perennials for a Shade Garden: Our Favorite Native Species and Hardy Flowering Plants

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    All week, we’re revisiting the most popular stories of 2025, including this one from July.

    A shade garden is a green and contemplative refuge. It can also be a botanical calendar, with flowers signaling the change of seasons. Well-chosen perennials for shade provide texture and pattern, flowers, and sometimes even fruit. They offer an indispensable layer of interest alongside the architecture of shrubs and trees, and the seasonal excitement of shade-loving annuals. Perennials are plants that return every year after a dormant period and they usually bloom for a few weeks. Choosing perennials whose bloom-time is staggered over the growing season gives us that gift that gardeners, in particular, enjoy: anticipation. Our favorite perennials for shade work harder, though, and are about more than flowers—their foliage or form is interesting even when the plant is not flowering. Here are 13 of our favorites.

    Foamflower, Tiarella cordifolia

    Above: Foamflower thrives in pots or in-ground.
    Above: Foamflower creates frothy carpets of flowers in early spring.

    Foamflower blooms in early spring, creating frothy pockets of brightness in the garden. This species of Tiarella propagates itself, establishing new plants from skinny surface-runners, making it a perfect naturalizer for shady path edges and woodland floors. When not in bloom, its maple-shaped leaves create a softly textured quilt. This Eastern native is hardy from USDA zones 4 (and possibly 3) to 9.

    Doll’s eyes, Actaea pachypoda

    Above: The graceful flowers of doll’s eyes are deliciously-scented

    Perhaps one of the best-scented perennials for shade, doll’s eyes are also known as white baneberry, thanks to the plants’ Halloween-ready, toxic white fruit on blood-red stalks in late fall. But in spring, they are all sweetness, with lemon-scented white flowers. This woodland native relishes full shade and blooms in mid-spring above prettily toothed leaves. Doll’s eyes are hardy from zones 3 to 8.

    Wake robin, Trillium species

    Above: Woodland elegance—Trilliums in mid-spring.

    The understated elegance of native Trilliums belongs to a woodland spring. Planted under deciduous trees in soil rich in leaf humus or compost, they bask in spring sunshine and shelter in early summer shade. They are especially effective planted in groups with companion plants that fill out when the Trilliums are dormant, from summer onwards. Different species have blooms that may be white, yellow, or red, with erect or nodding flowers, and most are hardy within zones 4 to 7.

    Meadow rue, Thalictrum species

    Above: The white flowers of native tall meadow rue in a pot on my Brooklyn terrace.
    Above: Meadow rue (native to Asia) has purple flowers.

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  • Tom Stuart Smith’s Garden at the 2024 Chelsea Flower Show

    Tom Stuart Smith’s Garden at the 2024 Chelsea Flower Show

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    This week, as the Chelsea Flower Show goes viral on every media outlet, we take a look at Tom Stuart-Smith, the comeback—after an absence of 14 years. A  super-heavyweight of British garden design, Stuart-Smith’s show resumé describes his work as combining “naturalism with modernity, and built forms with romantic planting,”  before reminding us that one of his clients was HM the Queen. And just to recap: He has now won nine gold medals at Chelsea, including three Best in Show. Stuart-Smith’s gardens caused such a stir in the 1990s that their legacy is still very much with us: water-filled tanks of Corten steel, peeling river birch, cloud pruning, and strongly disciplined color all come to mind.

    Stuart-Smith has implied during his long absence that he didn’t have a compelling reason to do another garden on Main Avenue. He was lured by Project Giving Back, a private funding collective (who last year bagged the reluctant star Cleve West). One of PGB’s conditions for funding—that a show garden must be permanently re-sited afterwards in a place where it can do good—is also part of its attraction to garden designers. They make a garden for a charity of their choice, then Chelsea’s publicity machine puts it under a giant spotlight. Tom Stuart-Smith’s show garden for the National Garden Scheme is about the joy of garden visiting and garden making. It’s that simple.

    Photography for Gardenista by Jim Powell.

    Above: Seasonal favorites, foxgloves and cow parsley make the grade on Tom Stuart-Smith’s Chelsea garden.

    The National Garden Scheme is a staple of summer for British gardeners, allowing them to look in other people’s backyards, while having a bit of tea and cake—all for a nominal fee. Since this is a transaction that takes places all over the British Isles, from spring until autumn, the NGS makes a lot of money, which is donated to nursing and health charities. It is also inherently “good for you” to be out in a garden, gazing at plants and listening to birds singing, so the benefits are exponential.

    Stuart-Smith is a reliable purveyor of unusual plants in his gardens but also, the very, very familiar, which are the elements that will be reproduced all over the world: towering white foxgloves in a sea of cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris), almost shockingly “common” since it’s found on every wayside and, now that the Royal Parks allow unmowed areas, in every park.

    Above: A stone sink is filled with rain water, which works its way down from the roof (of oak shingles), funneled into a terracotta pipe and then fed from the bottom. It is surrounded by Farfugium giganteum.

    Since we are talking about garden visiting, this is a good one to walk on, should you be so lucky; it is lightly shaded by three multi-stemmed hazels, which give an idea of coppicing, a practice which only real gardeners understand the value of, since hazel re-sprouts after cutting down almost to the ground, providing useful straight poles.

    Above: Geranium pratense ‘Mrs Kendall Clarke’ with kinetic grass, Melica altissima ‘Alba’.

    On describing his last woodland garden for Chelsea, Stuart-Smith said that he uses repeats of species, focusing on texture and form, over color. This still rings true, and in the 2024 garden he takes his restricted palette to the point of monochrome, and a slightly chilly, detached air. But if you look, and then look again, the garden reveals itself. The plant basics haven’t changed much either, with iris, umbellifers, astrantia and hardy geraniums also making a comeback.

    Above: Maianthemum flexuosum, groundcovers Galium odoratum and shiny Hosta ‘Devon Green’, Kirengeshoma palmata.

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