I love chatting with gardeners, but oh my, gardening has become so complicated – and convoluted. Do you know there are at least nine books on “Gardening for Dummies” – nine!
Each one is about 200 pages – are we all that dumb?? Really, how did gardening get so complicated that we need nine books to tell us how to add compost?
I seldom rant, it does little good, but I believe if we can untangle a few misconceptions, gardening simply makes more sense, and we can become more successful. Here’s a big one.
When chatting about a particular plant with gardeners, I am always asked
“Does it like sun or shade?”
or
“Is it a sun-lover or shade-lover?”
Such questions are usually accompanied by
“I don’t really have all day sun or shade in my yard, will a shade-lover or sun-lover live there? “How do I know where to plant it?”
Polygonatum odoratum ‘Variegatum’
A Teachable Moment
Plants don’t love anything; they don’t love (or hate) sun or shade or wet soils or poor soils, they tolerate them. When we substitute shade-tolerant for shade-loving, siting the plant starts to make sense.
Once they’ve changed their vocabulary, then we can talk about what sun-tolerant and shade-tolerant really means. It is so simple, it can’t be right.
A shade-tolerant plant simply does not tolerate afternoon sun, whereas a sun-tolerant plant does. No love involved!
That’s all there is to this sun and shade dilemma. End of discussion. I can’t think of a single garden plant that does not tolerate morning sun (including ferns, hostas and trilliums) but the brutal afternoon sunshine in the summer is where the path forks.
Fatsia japonica ‘Spider Web’
Now, when my “students” go the garden center and see all those Shade Lover and Sun Lover plant signs and labels, they simply use their new vocabulary and know exactly where and where not to plant them.
Now don’t get me started on pruning, or fertilizer or …
When I was a brand new gardener, Gardening for Dummies was the first book I bought, and I found it very helpful. 🙂 It still sits on my shelf, whereas I’ve given many other gardening books away over the years.
Also, I think gardening IS pretty complicated in the sense that there is so much to learn, and that it takes years of experience to really know what you’re doing. But that’s what makes it gratifying, too.
Thank you for an entertaining and useful Rant, Dr.A. We’ve had a helluva hot summer in Texas. Some of our plants may be shade-tolerant, but all of the sane people down here are unabashed shade-lovers.
I love this article. It is really helpful. I think that we try to put plants where we want to place them… despite their shade or sun tolerance. It’s a hard lesson to learn. That is why gardening is so much fun… always learning.
Not to mention that full sun up north is not nearly as brutal as full sun down south … so many plants, varieties, variables…it’s all trial and error, and we learn as we grow !!!
It gets more complicated if you consider different climates rather than having a generic two dimensional view of the world.
I gardened in a cool temperate climate, many plants thrived in full sun and failed under partial shade. When I moved to a semi-arid climate I took these same plants with me, and many died in full sun. I could only grow them with partial shade, the more shade I gave them the better they performed out there.
I have since moved back to a cooler, wetter climate and the same thing happened. Plants that needed a lot of shade to survive in the arid climate need full sun here or they don’t cope.