Dave: Hi I’m Dave Epstein, this is Growing Wisdom. Let’s talk some shade with Jackie Anza today. We’re under the shade tent.

Jackie: Yes we are.

Dave: We don’t need the shade today because it’s cloudy.

Jackie: True.

Dave: But there’s a lot of plants and folks I’ve got a lot of questions. Why do I grow on a shade? People say I can only grow hosta; there’s a lot more than hosta, isn’t there?

Jackie: Yes there is, I mean, check out what we have in here.

Dave: A lot of stuff. Tell me some of your favorite perennials for the shade.

Jackie: Well, plenty of things, I mean, we can start just with this whole heuchera group here. We have millions of different leaves and colors and you get textures in there. That is a great fill in plant for the shade.

Dave: What would you do with that, how would you plant that?

Jackie: They generally need to come up in the front of a border but all of them, you know, you put that up against the common hosta, and immediately your hosta looks better.

Dave: And as we move over here, I noticed these plants here have some really funky leaves. Tell me about this leaf.

Jackie: Okay, this is a rodgersia, they’re just spectacular when you’re looking for foliage. These ligularias, the leaf on them is huge. They’re just fabulous kind of in the back of a perennial bed.

Dave: And further down, almost behind us, we have these spikes coming up. What’s that?

Jackie: This is all astilbe, and you get every shade of red, and white and pinks and even corals and you know they’ll start blooming, maybe July first. Some of them bloom as late as September.

Dave: Jackie, tell me how long people can expect the blooms to last?

Jackie: You know some of them last four or five weeks, they tend to fade after they bloomed but if you’ve just did astilbe’s, you could get six, seven, eight weeks of color in your garden.

Dave: What do they like? What type of soil and light conditions?

Jackie: Well, they’re one of the plants that they do like wet feet so they do want water and after they bloom, you probably just going to want to cut it back because it doesn’t look particularly attractive after that.

Dave: Cut the whole plant back or just the bloom?

Jackie: Generally, just the blooms.

Dave: I like this little purplely white, it looks like bleeding heart to me.

Jackie: This is bleeding heart, this is a smaller variety, some people call it ever blooming it continues to grow. It’s wonderful to, I think, to plant it with very traditional bleeding heart because when once this goes by the board, this comes right near it.

Dave: So Jackie I think with some of the plants you introduced today we could create a pretty nice shade garden.

Jackie: Shade gardens can be fabulous. Don’t let the fact that you don’t have big giant flower heads deter you. Shade gardens can be fabulous.

Dave: Well thanks and you’re fabulous and we hope you’ve enjoyed this fabulous video here at Growing Wisdom.