One of the most challenging tasks for any homeowner is finding those perfect plants for the shade garden or north side of the house. Whenever teaching home landscape design classes I am always bombarded with requests to suggest a few plants that are not only attractive but will flourish in shady areas and woodland sites.

Here come those fabulous Brunnera to the rescue. They tend to form 12 inch to 18 inch high mounds that are 18 inches 24 inches wide with baby blue to lavender forget-me-not type flowers occurring in late spring to early summer and lasting up to four weeks. They typically have heart shaped shaped leaves, some with yellow margins, some with silver spots and still others with silverfish overlays. They all have one thing in common, they are attractive not only when blooming but all season long. They are capable of making a statement as an accent plant or as a solid groundcover, and best of all they handle a lot of shade. I have grown them under our Jack Pines and along the north side of our foundation with equal success. Best of all the leaves hold well into the late fall. We have a Jack Frost Brunnera against our foundation that still exhibited gorgeous foliage two weeks after the leaves from the adjacent hostas had frozen back for the year.

Brunnera tend to be very forgiving and are generally rated for zones 3 - 8. They will not tolerate too much sun or heat, however, so protect them. These plants prefer soils that have good drainage. One of the things that I always recommend with most plantings is what I refer to as a $100 hole for a $10 plant. By this I mean that the best time to influence the health and long term vigor of a plant is at the time of planting. A good rule of thumb is to dig your planting hole at least twice as wide as the plant rootball itself, and preferably three times as wide. I always then backfill around the plant with a mix of 1/3 native soil, 1/3 good quality screened topsoil, and 1/3 organic matter such as sphagnum peat moss. I employ this same procedure with the Brunnera I plant.

Following are four of my favorite Brunnera varieities:

1. Brunnera macrophylla ‘Hadspen Cream’ has heart shaped shaped leaves with green centers flanked by irregular yellow margins. It is absolutely beautiful and brightens the foggiest, shadiest day.
2. .Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’ is one that I have specified for several years as a groundcover par excellence. It has strong green leaf veins and a wonderful silverfish overlay. Get ready for the compliments from your guests.
3. Brunnera macrophylla ‘Langtrees’ has numerous irregular white to silver spots between the veins on the outer half of the leaves.
4. Brunnera macrophylla ‘Looking Glass’ has heart shaped leaves that cup downward and are a rather solid silver in color. I have ordered 25 for my own gardens for this coming spring.

All of the Brunnera mix well with other shade tolerant plants. I always like to see them planted in clusters of 3, 5, 7 and so forth. Many times I will specify the Jack Frost massed in front of Krossa Regal or Blue Angel Hostas. The size and color contrast makes for a striking bed. Dress the bed up with some Lamium maculatum ‘Purple Dragon’ or ‘Pink Pewter’ creeping in front for an added treat.

Brunnera are also terrific for setting off a bed of Taunton Yew used as a backdrop. I also like to mix in an occasional Fanal or Etna Astilbe for a splash of red for contrast and to accentuate the unusual foliage of the Brunnera.

Finally, the most breathtaking shade bed I have ever seen was the simplest. It was a mass planting of Jack Frost Brunnera acting as the groundcover beneath three wonderful five stem clump Whitespire birches. There were a few very large character boulders imbedded for additional accent.

Whatever you choose for your shade bed, just don’t overlook those incredible Brunnera. Those challenges and frustrations created by the shade will simply melt away as your success rate soars. Happy landscaping!

Donna Evans is co-owner of Gizmo Creations LLC, a landscape design and website design company located just north of Brainerd, Minnesota. Gizmo Creations designs landscapes for homeowners, commercial buildings and landscape contractors throughout the country. Gizmo Creations has numerous sample plans and photos of landscapes on their website at http://www.gizmocreations.com.

Your outdoors will look marvelous and full of splendor if you decorate well with artificial topiary trees. Imagine having a garden thats so scenic and majestic. Each morning you wake up and you look at it, it blows all lifes problems away. One sight of it makes you feel proud about your grand work, and when your friends come over, they tell you just how wonderful your garden looks. All of us would love to have a garden that is that perfect and it is possible for us to have one. But we must go about it a certain way. This page will help you make any artificial topiary tree blend with your outdoors.

The first thing you must do is know what you want. Know exactly what you want to accomplish. What area of your outdoors do you want to enliven? Which area do you want to make look more like yourself, your personality, your style, and your mood? Pick the exact area of your outdoors that you want to place the artificial topiary tree in. Notice the shapes in the garden. What about the other trees and plants? Do they blend well? Do you see a pattern? Is there a style? If not, and if you want to create your own style, note that you may have to do more work than just picking and buying an artificial tree. You may have to do a lot of land work first to prepare the environment.

Next, determine the shapes in the garden or outdoors. Is there a natural pattern in the trees and plants? Is there an overall shape being emphasized? What shape is it? How can you make it better or more beautiful? If you have to design your garden from scratch, take a piece of paper, sit back and look at your garden. Look at it with the eyes of creativity. What exactly do you want to make of this area? What mood do you want to convey? Sit back and start drawing shapes on your paper. Dont get discouraged when you dont get the best ideas. Keep doing it and youll soon come up with an idea for your outdoors that will please and that you know will work just fine for you.

Now, here is something that probably most topiary designers dont consider when designing their outdoors or designing a garden. Look at the position of your home. Look at the other major structures around your outdoors. Do you know that they impact the way people look at your garden. For example, if your topiaries and your magnificent design work is next to the area where you dump your leaves in the Fall, your design work will be related to that and will also appear messy. Try to design your outdoors so there is no sharp contrast in perceived beauty. Let the messy stay with the messy, and the beautiful with the beautiful. This little tip could mean a lot once your hard design work is complete.

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Morning coffee with the internet has become a tradition of mine in recent years. The internet holds a much greater variety of information than the newspaper, as well as less depressing things to read at the beginning of the day. No one should have to wake up with murder and mayhem in their face. A more pleasant mindset is found in waking to check the weather, respond to a note from a friend, or reading about an exciting new plant. This morning I went to look for further information on a particularly nifty new plant on one of my vendors sites. Not finding that I clicked on another link that caught my attention in their Garden Writers section.

Meatballs, Soapboxes and Tuna Cans, to be precise.

To a person who has never been employed within the landscape industry, that phrase would bring to mind food. To insiders it would have a far different meaning. Of course where I worked it was baseballs and cubes. So this mornings coffee was sipped between chuckles.

The author (head of sales) I would venture to say is younger than 50. Those over 50 feel that these balls, cubes, footballs or tuna cans are a staple that is required in the landscape. For the life of me I have never understood why we must have them. What is so necessary about using a shrub far to large for its placement and whacking off its limbs to shape it into an unnatural form? Off with its head! It should wear a size 42 long jacket, but we will force it to fit comfortably into a 10 short. It is interesting to note that also helpless poodles have also fallen victim to this manner of unnatural shaping and they are not plants. A month ago I witnessed a house cat shorn in this manner.

Mr. Woods, who wrote the afore mentioned article, has developed the opinion that it is an inherent human instinct. That we humans have so little that we actually have complete control over that our psyche has tuned in to the helpless shrubs in our yard. While I giggled often while reading his words, it struck me that he has a good point. Why else would we so cruelly inhibit the wild beauty of a shrub? In my early years I had no reason to argue with my father, the professional landscaper as to why we must do this. Quite the contrary, originally I assisted him in his whacking while trying to mimic his methods. It wasnt until I started to design plantings and began to see plants for their own individual beauty that I began to question this barbaric practice. It has come to be a long standing argument between us over the years. He refuses to budge from his Pro Juniper stance, insisting we simply MUST have the prickly old things. Yews and Burning Bushes have their place and are quite lovely if not placed where they can be gently shaped not beaten in submission twice a season.

During my contracting days, I would arrive at a clients home for a meeting about a landscape facelift to find the sad remains of Burning Bushes, Yews and Junipers that had resided along the walk or foundation for decades. All of them left much to be desired in the looks department after the last harsh whacking. Common sense told me that following decades of cruel treatment, the poor things have given up growing hair. Why should they continue to grow it if for the past 25 years every attempt was quickly lopped off? How much squelching of creativity can a being endure before throwing in the towel? In voicing this thought to successful lawyers and surgeons , I must admit I was rewarded with raised eyebrows. Why do we insist on planting a shrub that will grow eight foot tall and 12 foot wide in a 30 inch wide space and insist it does not exceed those confines? I am in agreement with Mr. Woods, it is one area to have complete control over in our lives.

So there I stand with this super successful professional, a man of high learning, who wants to know how we can coax this spent row of 5 foot tall trunks and stems along his walk into growing more hair in the bottoms. He thinks that fertilizer cures all of mans cruelty. (Remember that you must see things through the eye of the plant?) How am I to explain this to this person! My professional self developed a cunning approach. A landscape has a life expectancy of about 20 years. Yours seems to be about 5 years overdue for replanting. If this was not enough to convince the customer, I would go on to ask how long the wallpaper in their kitchen had hung there. Explaining that redecorating outdoors was just as necessary to variety in life than it was to keep up to date with their interior dcor. But they wanted back what they had before it turned into bare branches! The issue of certain control may very well be the answer.

Now I am not against hedges. I am not anti-evergreen. Pruning, thinning and shaping is of definite necessity to full and lovely shrubs and even some trees. Even every other aspect of life we look for the right thing to accomplish the task, but when it comes to the plants we place in our yards we seem to fall short in the search for the proper element. Proper planning should be the first consideration and whacking could become almost obsolete. It is good to know that plant breeders are busily developing new Arborvitaes and Yews that will stay in a nice little meatball shape without whacking. News that will lessen the maintenance you must forfeit your weekend to perform, alleviate the need to butcher the bushes and make all the hedge trimmer companies hold their breath over next years third quarter earnings.

As for the aspect of proper planning vs. constant replacement, if the space is 30 inches wide, then it would be best to consider installing only those shrubs that will never exceed 4 foot in width. Remember, a little shaping is good and a harsh whacking is lowering the life expectancy of the elements in your landscape. Proper planning is one of the best tools in creating a low maintenance planting.

Whack-O-Matic Tammy Clayton Copyright 2005 Tammy Clayton

Read more great Gardening articles at: http://www.lostintheflowers.com

About the author: Raised by a highly respected & successful landscape contractor in the metro Detroit area, Clayton wanted a career in anything but landscaping! Now an award-winning landscape designer, Clayton runs Flowerville Farms, a mail-order nursery in Michigan. Read more at LostInTheFlowers.com.