LESLIE: Janet in Arizona is looking for landscape tips for shady yards. What can we do for you?
JANET: I live in Sedona, Arizona, which is – and I live kind of up in a canyon area headed up towards Flagstaff here. And I have a really hard time getting any plants to grow around the very shady sides of my house, in kind of border boxes and things like that. And I’ve tried a few different things and just with not much luck. So I’m just wondering if you guys have any suggestions.
TOM: What have you tried?
JANET: I’ve tried coleuses, pansies. Right now, I do actually have something called Astilbe that’s kind of working there.
LESLIE: Mm-hmm. Have you tried hostas?
JANET: Hostas? I don’t think I’ve tried hostas.
TOM: What about a copper plant? Have you ever seen a copper plant? They’re very beautiful. They’re sort of a greenish, red, orange kind of a plant with big leaves.
JANET: Oh, nice. No I haven’t heard that one. I can look for that, yeah. That would be great.
TOM: You said you tried – what about Begonias? That’s a good shade flower.
JANET: I think I’ve tried those in my hanging baskets and they don’t do well, either.
TOM: Mm-hmm.Yeah.
JANET: Yeah.
TOM: Well, some of these landscape tips for shady yards are going to be trial and error. You know, I know that Home Depot has a new garden club that they’re doing now out of the local stores. And they’ve got some real experts that are associated with that.
JANET: Yeah.
TOM: So that might be a good place. Or just go to a local nursery and see what they recommend for landscape tips for shady yards.
JANET: Yeah. OK. Will do.
TOM: But those are the typical shade plants that we would put in desert locations.
JANET: Yeah.
LESLIE: I mean I use hosta all across the country whenever there’s shade. And they come back. They’re very hardy. It’s a perennial, so it’ll come back season after season if you’re able to.
JANET: Yeah. OK.
LESLIE: And they really – they thrive in the shade. And there’s a ton of different varieties of hosta, so you can find them sort of variegated from a yellow and green, a green and white, different tones on the greens.
JANET: Uh-huh. Right. Right.
LESLIE: So there’s probably one that you like. And occasionally, the ones that I have in my super-shady areas almost never flower. The ones that get partial shade will get sort of a long, whispy one stem with a couple of purple flowers on it.
JANET: Mm-hmm. Right, right. Right.
LESLIE: But check them out because you really can’t kill them.
JANET: Yeah. Yeah, I think that that’s a great suggestion. Thank you very much.
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