Welcome back to SD CNTY.I'm just up the freeway from you in Oceanside,along the coast,not the valley.On the NE side of my house i have impatients,lobelia,hydrangeas,and ferns.They all get watered just twice a week when i turn on the sprinklers.I don't know if that's more watering then you want to do.As for the soil we had to amend all ours where we planted,because i think all the soil in Calif is clay.

My best friend lives in Carlsbad so i'll ask her what she has on the shady part of her yard as i don't remember.

Again welcome back to this little corner of the world!!
Kathi

There are lots of natives that don't need water once they are established. I think most of the flowering would want sun though. You might try heuchera. When plants say full sun it means part sun in my area due to the extreme temps in summer. Since you are along the coast that is another problem in lack of sun let alone being in shade. I have astilbe in shade.

Hellebores, 'Tropicanna' canna, aucuba (green and variegated), bearded iris, microlepia ferns, plectranthus, lamium, clivia, trailing helichrysums, heuchera, Japanese maples, oxalis siliquosa, brunnera 'Jack Frost', begonias, cyclamen, polygonatum groundcover, aptenia 'Red Apple' (invasive so put it only where it won't escape!), white callas, erysimums, polemonium, stacchys (lambs ear), Solanum jasminoides (potato vine), star jasmine.

All of these grow in the shade for me in coastal Northern CA, and your warmer weather will be absolutely to their liking. Only cyclamen and callas will disappear when the soil warms up, but they come back when it cools down.

Make a raised bed if you can, or a lasagne bed. Bad drainage kills more plants than anything else.

Lay a soaker hose with a quick-connect coupler. Mulch, and you'll only need to water weekly or less, once established. Unless we get a long hot spell, I only water once every two weeks, and my shadiest bed includes hydrangeas and rhodies.

Hi Trundrah,

Welcome to C'bad! A couple resources nearby to help you refurbish. Depending on how close you are to the coast, May Grey and June Gloom will cause mildew to attack your plants, so keep it in mind when selecting cause it will suck the life out of new plantings. Get our compost and mulch in Oceanside at the recycling facility El Corazon for a nominal fee - bring a few trash cans, buckets to fill them, and gloves for as much as you can carry. Best selection nurseries: Andersons La Costa (Una sends newletters), Armstrongs, Kurtuz, and Buena Creek Nursery. ALC and BCN gives the best advice for plant selection, and all have shade garden areas. I've tested the soil, and it's 50% sand, 25% silt, 25% clay, and 0% organic matter. Amend heavily and consider a raised bed. If you would like some colorful and shade-loving bromeliads, drop me a line, I have lots of them. =^,,^= diana

...one more thing... Harbor Freight in O'side carries a mesh-style soaker hose - the salt in the CO river water clogs foam and misting hoses, but the mesh is working wonderfully for me, and is easy to use. =^,,^=

I'll add......

Fatsia japonica, Acuba 'Mr. Goldstrike', Abutilon, Aspidastra (Cast Iron Plant), Heucheras, most ferns

Clivia miniata. It will bloom in deep shade and requires no care. Usually people have extras to give away.

wow! what a response--thank you all very much for the information and ideas!

- Diana- thanks for the info RE the mulch, i will look into that, as well as tell my mom! I also love Anderson's La Costa, its my long-time favorite. Haven't been to Buena Creek--where is it exactly? Also, my new haunt is Barrels and Branches--right near Santa Fe and El Camino Real. A group of girls my age run it (in their 30's) so maybe they just have similar taste as i, but i love their selection, both for plants and pots, and they're really sweet about special ordering things. Bromeliads could be fun--I think I'm going to go in a more tropical as opposed to "woodland" direction, so that could definitely work.

- jkom- thanks for the list! i was wondering how/if cannas would do in there. the front corner actually does get just a bit of sun in the AM--do you think thats enough? Also like the Brunnera!

Another question for you all experts--whats the deal with the hostas i keep seeing at the nurseries? are they just expensive "annuals" here (i.e. the bougainvillea they sold in my Zone 4 in Idaho)? i adore the look of them, but dont want to bother if they're just going to wither away and then kick the bucket... every book and catalog i have says they don't do Zone 10.

After some nursery-wandering on Saturday, I'm thinking:
- callas
- elephant ear
- variety of ferns
- heuchera
- potato vine (does anyone else have bad bugs w this one?)
- if possible cannas, and/or hostas

...?

the raised bed would defintely be a good thing, but it will take some convincing of the BF to undertake that project with me.

please keep the recs coming if you think of anything else.
thank you!!!

You can find BCN in San Marcos - see link. They have astonishing demo gardens in full bloom, and a shade demo garden by the sequoias. Another place with good selection is Green Thumb, but south of 78 on San Marcos Blvd.

As for Hostas, they are snail buffets and will not thrive here. =^,,^=

Here is a link that might be useful: BUENA CREEK GARDENS

A question about the raised bed:

if there are existing plants in the bed that i don't plan on moving (the Bird of Paradise and the guava--both very established), can i build a raised bed around them? that seems like a recipe for rotting stems/crowns/etc...at least on the BoP?

any thoughts on that?

No help on the raised bed, but I have a hosta (Patriot) I bought last year in a large pot. I bought it mainly to see if it would survive and it has, in spades. Snails and slugs do love them, though, so I sprinkle snail bait around the interior of the pot and also back behind it on the ground....I have it sitting on a piece of flagstone in a strip bed. I check it every late afternoon or so just to make sure no slugs/snails are hiding in the interior, and have only found one. I cut it back in late fall and it came back for me....here's a picture of it:
{{gwi:532954}}
It's the varigated plant in the pot near the end of the bed. It gets sun for about 2-3 hrs a day and as it gets hotter, I'll move it to an even shadier spot.

I also have full shade in my garden. I have varieties of camelia, hydrangea and a variety of lobelia which is thriving in the shade. I also have hostas in pots which I had to dig out of the garden because of the slugs.
jen

Hiya -

Welcome back to Cali and congrats on your new condo. I live about a half-mile from the sea, and so I think I may have similar growing conditions to yours. In answer to your question about calla lily drainage, mine flourish in soggy, boggy, heavy clay. I have to keep thinning them out every year because they keep spreading and will seemingly stop at nothing short of total domination. Somehow, the calla lilies have allowed the neighboring Australian tree fern, Persian shield and variegated vinca to coexist in the same shade bed.

With regards to building a raised bed, I think you will be able to do so and keep the existing plants. One thing you could do is surround the pre-existing ones with low pavers to "dam" out the new, higher soil. Then, if you want to mask the height discrepancy, mulch heavily. I use dropped needles from my Cook pine as mulch, and it does a great job of giving the appearance of a level bed.

Best of luck to you,
Myles

Thanks for this post.

I have only recently started being a backyard botanist and yes, have been tripping over my own two big feet, big size 15s, with frequency I might add. For a 51 year old guy who's loosing his eye-sight and can no longer fly airplanes and gets out to the mounts and back country less and less, even my favorite hobby of photography seems to need a supplement. And so, with a need to do something with a lot of landscaping probs, I turned to trying to solve some problemos on my own.

The first big problem was that this place here in Bakersfield is covered by lots of maturing shade trees and the lower growing shrubs and flowers were suffering. Desert Daisy plants were turning into rags and the shade was so thick that most things under the canopy were doing poorly. So the expensive op of thinning the trees was done. But still, I was pressed to try and find plants that could tolerate shade and was particularly interested in adding color.

Bakersfield has another problem which I learned quickly, temperature extremes, 90s and 100s in the summer and the occassional hard freeze in winter. Add to the problem mix the need to find tiered plants of varying heights and my first forray into gardening quickly becomes a tsunami of quests for answers, including experiments of many kinds, including cuttings, rhizome divisions and planting of various seeds.

The failures are numerous, partly because of the oppressive heat messing with my ability to germinate. But there have been successes. One plant, A golden or Yellow Canna, Canna Flacida, was already established in a single clump here and I have spread it just since this Spring, into many corners of the landscape. It's hardy in Sunlight and Shade and has beautiful green spade shaped leaves and so, is attractive even when not flowering. But I've stuck in some exotics like Australian Tree Ferns and Cut Leaf Philodendrons. These do very well in shade, but can be tall.

My first experiment with seeds were Medjool Date Palms from store bought dates, planted last October. I've got over a hundred baby date palms growing in pots right now. Don't know what to do with them all. They are very hardy. Even when the heat dries up their single blade leaves into brown needles, they are still alive and recover.

But most of these experiments, excepting the Canna, are not flowering type plants and things are indeed, too green. The quest for color is a tough one. I've recently added some Douglas Iris that I got from Oregon and hope it does well in partial shade. I find rhizome producing plants are very hardy and both Canna and the Douglas and Pacific Hybrid Iris fall into this category. I want therefore to try Heliconias too, another rhizome type plant. And yes, Bird of Paradise do well here in sun or shade.

I am happy to read above that Cyclamen are a good shade plant. I've seen these at Home Depot earlier this year and was immediately attracted to their brilliant colors. Nice. I'm going to give 'em a try. And I've also seen Clivia Miniata on the web and it seems to be a good candidate. I like those clumping plants and again, most rhizome producers fall into that category. I am even planning to order some clumping bamboo from an outfit up in Oregon to put in shady areas. This stuff however, gets to be anywhere from 15 to 30 feet tall and though not seeming as unmanageable as the running bamboo types, the height does imply a need for oversight.

Thanks again for this input and I hope there's something in this post that returns the favor.

One good deep shade idea that I gleened from the above conversations is the concept of 'shade cloth'. I only just now rigged some of this stuff ( as best I could in a hurry up mode ) to try and save my little nursery from 100 degree temps disaster.

Shade cloth from Home Depot comes in rolls for about $10.xx for one roll and is actually burlap material. What you see in the following photo is about how far one roll will go ...

{{gwi:532956}}

I've used a satellite TV mounting tripod with a broom handle as a horizontal tie-down and support on the free end and the roof eaves at the other.

Here's a side view ...

{{gwi:532957}}

And here's from underneath ...

{{gwi:532958}}

It doesn't look pretty, but it does create goodly shade while letting some sunlight through. I was desperate to do something to solve this heat problem on my patio. My poor scorched young plants are underneath and I don't know if I can save some of them. The window screening material did not work well enough to provide shade, but helped. It better serves to keep birds out and away from seeds.

Here are some of my hardy Medjool Date Palms in the shade of an existing ornamental tree and a potato bushe's long leafed branches ...

{{gwi:532959}}

Also in shade of an overshadowing tree are my Cassia Alata seedlings ...

{{gwi:532960}}

Some shade you must build and some comes naturally.