MADE in the SHADE
WHEN ONE CONSIDERS how many flowers fill Nancy Moss’ front garden, it’s a little surprising to find that it is a very shady, cool and damp place. “There’s tons of shade,” says Moss, a clinical psychologist. “It’s a difficult area, swampy in some spots, and I’ve tried all kinds of things. It’s just one of those places.”
The garden bed faces northeast and is surrounded by tall trees. Familiar shade-tolerant plants anchor the darkest areas directly under trees or in the shadows of the house. Camellias, clivia and azaleas are much in evidence. (The azaleas and the clivia were nipped by frost this winter.) Calla lilies cluster under the trees, even in the dense shade of a magnolia.
Two shade-loving bulbs were already growing here when the Mosses purchased the house 15 years ago. Lining every bed is blue-flowered Scilla campanulata , which at last check had been renamed Endymion hispanica , though it is generally still sold under its old, more pronounceable name, or simply as Spanish bluebell. Prolific and vigorous, it has spread all over the shadiest areas.
Allium triquetrum is the other bulb that adds bulk to this garden. It has white, nodding flowers and spreads slowly with time. It is curious that a bulb so useful is nearly impossible to find at nurseries. (Your best hope is to inherit a clump.) Both of these Mediterranean bulbs go completely dormant and disappear for the summer.
Other plants in Moss’ garden growing in at least partial shade are more surprising. Tulips, daffodils and Dutch iris, which are usually planted in full sun, do well here. And Moss has even found a few roses that work here, too. ‘Betty Prior,’ an old-fashioned-looking floribunda from 1935, is not as stiff and bushy as it is out in the sun, but it flowers well and has adopted a more casual, lacy appearance in partial shade. ‘Pristine,’ a rose of more recent vintage, also does well.
Pansies aren’t expected to grow well in partial shade, but they thrive here, along with obconica primroses, English daisies and foxgloves. However, the cinerarias that were growing in Moss’ garden turned to mush in this winter’s big freeze.
These annual flowers and the bulbs are planted in the fall for spring bloom. In late spring they are replaced by “herbs mostly, but also some nicotianas and marguerites,” Moss says. For summer, she plans for “a lot fewer flowers because they need so much water then.” During these past few years of drought, and this year as well, she and other gardeners have favored spring gardens over summer gardens, which require more water.
To fill in among flowers and bulbs, Moss uses perennials, including the frosty-pink ajuga, Japanese anemones and a number of true, ground-hugging geraniums, most of which she found at various Pasadena nurseries or at San Gabriel Nursery. She’s scattered iris here and there, and in summer, hollyhocks. In the fall, she also scatters seeds of johnny-jump-ups, sweet alyssum and forget-me-nots. Baby’s tears are a standby and provide a clue as to just how shady this garden really is.
Because, Moss says, by Pasadena standards hers is not one of the “better Spanish houses,” she has tried to make it look like a country home with garden influences from Spain, Provence and the English countryside.
In true Mediterranean fashion, the patio is filled with Italian pots and the occasional antique pot that Moss collected on her travels. Roses thrive in the pots beside citrus, felicia, various ivies (one is trained on a hoop) and night-blooming jasmine. This last, her favorite, clambers up the wall from its smallish pot.
The shady entry garden is patterned after casual English gardens. That such an English garden sits squarely in front of a Spanish house does not bother Moss one bit.
“You don’t have to play to bird-of-paradise,” she says.
