Mammoth® Mums

Some options for shade

Last week we talked about our display bed for full sun, but shade tends to be more challenging when it comes to landscape design. Over the summer, we experimented with varying degrees of shade in several of our display beds so let’s take a look at a couple of them to see what kind of options are available.

Here’s a garden that’s playing off the purple and orange color palette of another one nearby, but this bed has a little more shade to it. Only at about 3:30 in the afternoon does it start getting sun and therein lies the problem: it’s the hot sun, so this is a hard bed to fill—it’s had shade all morning.

‘Frog in a Blender’ 

Over here we have a bed that’s in full shade; it’s actually under a tree so it gets dappled light. Those are caladiums in the center— that’s ‘Aaron’ in the front and ‘Frog in a Blender’ in the back. Some of the light comes through the tree branches and gets caught by that very bright spot on ‘Aaron’, making it even brighter. You might say it amps up the dapple. 

Nonstop^®Mocca begonias with caladium

These begonias look happy—we haven’t tried Nonstop^® begonias in our beds in quite a long time. This is the Mocca series with dark leaf foliage; it was new for us this year. We’ve planted the yellow interspersed with the orange, so we have two vibrant colors with the dark leaves alongside the caladiums in green and white.

Everyone fawns over these particular begonias. They’re quite striking because the blooms are so large—some of them are three inches plus. That center island of caladiums breaks it up a bit and adds a little variety. It gives the illusion of depth; you look over the caladiums to see more begonias—it gives depth to the whole bed. 

‘Autumn Colors’

This bicolor rudbeckia was new last year—notice how each flower is a little bit different than all the others. It reminds us of the old I Spy game: every time we look at ‘Autumn Colors’ we spot a shade we hadn’t seen before. So far we’ve counted scarlet, orange, gold, bright yellow, maroon, bronze-red, and brown, but you might see even more. As we move from summer into fall these warm tones make for a nice change of pace in beds that have too many pinks and purples. 

‘Autumn Colors’ grows about 20–24 inches tall, so these are large-size flowers on a mid-size plant and there are lots of them—even more if you deadhead the spent blooms. Their classic form adds texture to a combo; we like to mix this variety with standard black-eyed Susans for some extra interest. Of course, ‘Autumn Colors’ is also a natural choice for mass plantings, especially in wildflower gardens where butterflies and hummingbirds can have at it. 

Other than deadheading ‘Autumn Colors’ is fairly low-maintenance, handling poor soil and even a bit of drought. It also tolerates some shade, though we find that it fares better in full sun. You can expect the blooms to last a long time, and if you cut some rather than simply deadheading they’ll last a long time in a vase as well.

Our ‘Autumn Colors’ rudbeckia is available in the 4.5 and 8-inch pot sizes. Please check the Availability section of our website for a complete list of our other rudbeckia selections in beautiful shades for fall.