Northern Shade Gardening

In my last post, I described how I use a spreadsheet to keep track of my plant information. You can see how to set up the details for a garden record keeping spreadsheet here. I attached a sample spreadsheet to show how useful it can be for sorting plants by different categories. I’ve included a screencast here to show how it can rearrange information about your plants.

Here is a flash demo sorting the northern shade spreadsheet by height. It starts automatically and the cursor shows the steps being completed. Just click the green arrow in the bottom left to see it again. This just shows the upper left corner of the spreadsheet, but I hope it gives a better picture.

This is shown using Microsoft Excel 2007, but I use an open source program called OpenOffice.org calc to create my spreadsheets. It is very similar.

Although I find it very helpful to organize my plant data and keep records for planning, I realize that sometimes beauty is intangible and hard to quantify.

I like to keep track of my garden plants. Using a spreadsheet helps me organize the information so it’s easily accessible in a useful way. I add to it as I get new plants, updating the information as I learn more about the plants in my garden. I find it particularly helpful, because I can sort the information by a number of different factors, depending on what I want to know. I’ve attached a copy of my spreadsheet as a sample of what you can do. You can download it and modify it to organize your own garden records.

I use an open source program called OpenOffice.org calc for my spreadsheet, but I’ve saved a copy as an Excel document for anyone who’d like to see it in this format using Microsoft Office Excel. You have to highlight the whole chart before sorting, or it only sorts the one column which messes it up. Once the whole spreadsheet is highlighted, in Microsoft Office Excel 2007 you click “data”-> “sort”-> “sort by”. In the “sort by” drop down menu, you pick the name of the column you’d like to sort the information by.

Northern Shade Plant Spreadsheet, Microsoft Office Excel version

The 1st, 2nd and 3rd columns have the genus, species and cultivar or variety name of the plant. The 4th column has the common name. My default arrangement is in alphabetical order by genus name, but you can also rearrange by the 4th column to see them arranged in alphabetical order by common name. I started last year putting a Z in front of the genus name for plants that die or that I remove from the garden instead of deleting them from the spreadsheet. This effectively places them at the end of the list, since I have no zinnias.

The 5th and 6th columns contain the height and width measurements of the plants. I start off with the plant label measurements and change them as I see how it performs in the garden. Now this is where the spreadsheet format comes in handy. I can highlight the chart and reorder by the 5th column. With 3 clicks my plants are all rearranged in order by height. This is useful when looking for a back of the border plant or edging perennial. If I sort by the 6th column, I will have all my plants arranged from narrowest to broadest width.

The 7th column contains the flower colour. I can re-order the plants with 3 clicks into colour groupings and quickly find all of my blue or white plants, I put the main colour first and a modifier after it so you can sort by ‘blue light’ and ‘blue purple’ if you want or ‘yellow gold’ and ‘yellow purple’.

In the 8th column I put the best estimate I can find, from the tag or other source, of the coldest zone in which it is supposed to survive. Then I can easily re-sort by zone hardiness. All the plants that are supposed to be hardy to zone 4 will all be together. If I was more into coddling my plants, I might add protection for these plants before the winter, but mostly I let the trees lay down a layer of leaves for insulation and count on good snow cover for an extra fluffy insulation layer. However, it’s still good to know which plants might be more risky. In hotter climates where heat tolerance is a more limiting factor, the other end of the zone scale would be more useful.

Light exposure preferences are in the 9th column. I use a 1 for the sun lovers down to a 4 for the most shade tolerant. Then I can easily click and rearrange the plants by light preference, 1 is sun, 2 is part shade/sun, 3 is used for part shade, and 4 is part shade/shade.

The 10th column has bloom time information. I use the month number in order to make it sortable in a useful way. If it blooms mostly in May it gets a 5. If it blooms from May to July it gets a 5/6/7. This way the plants sort by the month they start blooming in and then each is arranged by how long it blooms for. To make the numbers sort correctly like this, I formatted the column for text.

I also use a separate line chart to keep track more precisely of when my plants bloom and for how long. You can read about how to keep track of plant bloom times in this post.

The 11th column labels the plants as perennial, bulb or shrub. Click, click, click and all of the bulbs are sorted together. I haven’t included my trees on the spreadsheet.

In the 12th column I put the year the plant was originally added to my garden. I can then reorganize by how long a plant has been in my garden. Plants that I brought from my old house or were already in the garden usually get a 2000, so they’ll sort at the top.

Now, to counterbalance all those spreadsheet rows, columns and obsessive quantifying, here’s an area of my garden from last year with more unruly abandon.

Now if only the rearranging in the garden was as quick as on my spreadsheet. Do you use a spreadsheet, or a different method of keeping track of your plants? If you use a spreadsheet, what columns do you find useful? Can you think of any other columns that would be helpful for recording and sorting plant information?

I’ve added a flash demo showing how the garden spreadsheet sorting works in the next post.

Blue colours bring a little echo of the sky down to the garden. The perennials Linum perenne ‘Blue Sapphire’ (flax) and Phlox divaricata ‘Clouds of Perfume’ (woodland phlox) are adding more cool toned blue and lavender colours to the garden now. Their blooms join the other blue and purple flowers, Muscari armeniacum ‘Blue spike’ (grape hyacinths) which is just about done, Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’ (Siberian bugloss), and annual Lobelia.

The Phlox divaricata ‘Clouds of Perfume’ (woodland phlox) are a gorgeous bluish lavender colour. Their variety name is more of a metaphor than an accurate description, since they don’t have a strong scent. However they do have wonderful clouds of blooms that are visible for a distance. Each bloom is like a child’s drawing of a flower. The plant is covered in them, even in medium deepish shade, but they won’t bloom in deep shade competing with a willow. I used to have this perennial for 4 or 5 years underneath a willow on the north side of a fence, in a corner, where it just sat, neither blooming nor spreading. Then I moved it to a new location, still on the north side of a fence, where it gets only a couple of hours of direct light. It was so relieved, that it started blooming profusely and gently spreading out. Sometimes it takes a bit of experimenting to find the happy spot.

My Linum perenne ‘Blue Sapphire’ (flax) gets one of the coveted sunnier spots in the garden. With flax, the more sun the more blooms. They don’t really open their flowers much on a cloudy day or in the evening. This is a delicate looking plant that is actually quite hardy and easy care. The foliage is an attractive, slightly bluish green. This perennial has very narrow grass-like leaves. The stems are long and supple, swaying with the breeze. However the pretty sky blue flowers are the real treat. Each flower doesn’t last long, but is quickly followed by many more. Flax blooms for a couple of months. The flowers used to self seed at my old house, but the seedlings were easy to pull out or move. Flax is not annoying since it doesn’t bother its neighbours or compete in the lawn like some seeders. I have these surrounded by cocoa shell mulch in this garden, so I hardly have any seedlings now.

The Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’ (Siberian bugloss) is still flowering, but with fewer blooms. I’ve already written an ode to this plant and detailed its great traits. This is a clump of 3 plants. Their leaves are developing the heart shape and extensive silver frosting now. These Brunnera are very happy under the shade of the maple tree. They are thick enough to suppress most of the maple keys, unlike some plants in the garden.

Lobelia, it’s not just for spilling out of containers. Lobelia is one of my favourite annuals to mix with perennials in the shade. I especially love the sky blue varieties. I used to get ‘Cambridge Blue’, but I can never find it anymore, so I now plant ‘Riviera Sky Blue’. They do well in part shade, but they do like regular moisture. I think lobelia has a shorter life in places with hotter summers. As good little annuals, they flower from May, right through until after the first frosts in my zone 3 garden. They look like a river of blue winding through the mixed beds. I also use them as a temporary fill in around young perennials until they grow in later years to fill their spaces. Sometimes a splash of blue looks better than a sea of mulch. You can see some at the back of the flax picture too.

I love the colour blue in the garden. It’s calm, soothing and easy on the eye. Both lavender and blue coordinate so well with green foliage, and they make for a serene garden.