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Shrubs for north facing


The Best Plants for a North-Facing Yard - Lawn Care Blog

If you’re planning a north-facing yard, knowing the best plants for your landscape is key. The unique characteristics of northward lawns can make landscaping a challenge, but there are plenty of plants that can thrive here. Read on to see some of the best plants for a north-facing yard.

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Characteristics of a north-facing yard?

North-facing yards generally get less sun than other areas around your home. This means a north-facing landscape will need shade-loving plants that can handle a little extra moisture. It also helps if they are resistant to fungal diseases caused by moisture. Luckily, there’s no shortage of great garden ideas for a north-facing landscape’s shady conditions.

Best plants for a north-facing yard

From ground covers to statement shrubs and climbing vines, all kinds of greenery can thrive in your north-facing garden. These are some of the best plants for a north-facing yard. Also, check out this article on Lawn Love about how to landscape north-facing yards.

Ground Covers

It can be tricky to grow grass in the shade of a north-facing yard, so you might want to consider a hardy vining or flowering ground cover instead. These ground covers will keep your yard looking fresh, shade or shine.

Virginia Creeper
Dominik Rheinheimer | Pixabay

Perfect for gardeners who love native plants, Virginia creeper is found throughout the eastern and central United States. This member of the grape family creates a lush ground cover up to a foot tall, helps control erosion, and is hardy in drought, shade, and cold. In the fall, the Virginia Creeper‘s green leaves turn orange and red, while spring brings delicate flowers and berries that attract songbirds.

Sweet Woodruff
PxHere

Sweet woodruff is a delicate flowering groundcover with a multitude of uses – historically, it’s been used as an herbal remedy for several ailments, while the white flowers are traditionally used to flavor riesling and to ward off moths. It loves moist soil and part shade to full shade, so it’ll be right at home in your north-facing yard.

Perennialsbeauty of nature | Pixabay

Looking for flowers that come back year after year? These perennial flowers love shade and moist soils, making them a great fit for your north-facing landscape.

Jacob’s Ladder
San | Pixabay

Jacob’s ladder forms beautiful purplish-blue flowers in a stacked formation, the source of its name. These native wildflowers are members of the phlox family and bloom in May and June, though their foliage will stay green all summer long.

Toad Lily
Thierry Fillieul | Pexels

Toad lilies are unique fall bloomers that produce small, orchid-like blooms in a purple tortoiseshell pattern. Native to Japan, toad lilies are a relatively new botanical novelty, with several variegated cultivars that have been developed only in the last two decades.

Flowering Shrubs

Flowering shrubs can help provide structure in a north-facing landscape, and many also attract pollinators and help with erosion control. These bushy blooms are the perfect addition to your north-facing yard.

Rhododendron
congerdesign | Pixabay

Rhododendrons are a huge family of flowering shrubs, but all of them thrive in dappled shade. Because there is such a wide variety, you’re sure to find a rhododendron to suit your space, whether you’re looking to dress up small shady areas or a sprawling north-facing landscape.

Bush Honeysuckle
Joshua Mayer | Flickr

Honeysuckle bushes are adaptable to just about any light conditions, and their wide variety of landscaping uses makes them a smart choice for any garden. They’re tolerant of drought and soil compaction, easily planted on slopes, and attractive to plenty of pollinators.

Evergreens

Evergreen plants are often the stars of a north-facing landscape, with flourishing flowers and lush green foliage that stay strong year-round. These shrubs and flowers are a great place to start.

Hellebore
Teodor | Pixabay

Unique hellebores are related to buttercups, and their hooded flowers can be white, pink, red, blue, or even black. These plants have adapted to droop to a 45 degree angle to weather frost and snow. They prefer partial to full shade, and typically flower between December and April.

American Wintergreen
Dendroica cerulea | Flickr

American wintergreen is a native groundcover shrub that provides dark green leaves in winter landscapes with full to partial shade. The leaves of this versatile plant have a minty scent and a long history of medicinal use due to anti-inflammatory properties. Wintergreen has luminous white flowers that produce edible red berries in the summertime. In the fall, leaves turn to a deep purple.

Glossy-Leaved Paper Plant
Wikimedia

The glossy-leaved paper plant, or Fatsia japonica, is a beautiful evergreen shrub perfect for a shady north-facing landscape or container garden. It’s also easy to transplant, and is tolerant of sandy soils, salt spray, cold, and air pollution.

Autumn Fern
liz west | Flickr

Autumn fern is a charming dwarf fern that may look delicate, but it has the ability to withstand drought, shade, and extreme heat and cold. It gets its name from its leaves, which turn copper-red in early spring. Its slow and steady growth pattern makes it a good fit as an evergreen groundcover or a shady border. 

Climbing Plants

Climbing plants are a handy addition to a north-facing landscape, as they’re often able to stretch out into sunnier parts of the lawn. These flowering climbers will add a pop of color to your north-facing shady spots.

Hybrid Musk Roses
Hervé Simon | Flicker

Roses typically need a lot of sun, but hybrid musk roses are a perfect addition to a partially shady, north-facing landscape, as they can handle as few as five hours of direct sunlight per day. These fragrant flowers are almost everblooming, and they first blossomed in the early 1900s, when they were introduced as a hybrid of the original musk rose.

Star Jasmine
Choo Yut Shing | Flickr

Star jasmine is a climbing vine that produces small but mighty white pinwheel-shaped flowers with a potent sweet fragrance. It’s tolerant of drought and versatile to many different conditions, and is particularly common in the Southeast. 

Get the Garden That’s Right for You

Selecting the best plants for a north-facing landscape can be a tricky process, but luckily, you don’t have to rely on trial and error to get the north-facing garden of your dreams.

Our Lawn Love pros can help you select plants that will thrive in your north-facing yard. Call or click today for expert advice on creating a lush landscape that fits your needs.

Main photo credit: Pxhere

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Annie Parnell

Originally from the Washington, D.C., area, Annie Parnell is a freelance writer and audio producer based in Richmond, Virginia. She is passionate about gardening, outdoor recreation, sustainability, and all things music and pop culture.

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11 Best Shade Plants to Grow Along a North-Facing Wall

From Ground Covers to Shrubs

By

David Beaulieu

David Beaulieu

David Beaulieu is a landscaping expert and plant photographer, with 20 years of experience.

Learn more about The Spruce's Editorial Process

Updated on 06/15/22

Reviewed by

Kathleen Miller

Reviewed by Kathleen Miller

Kathleen Miller is a highly-regarded Master Gardener and Horticulturist who shares her knowledge of sustainable living, organic gardening, farming, and landscape design. She founded Gaia's Farm and Gardens, a working sustainable permaculture farm, and writes for Gaia Grows, a local newspaper column. She has over 30 years of experience in gardening and sustainable farming.

Learn more about The Spruce's Review Board

The Spruce / Sarah Crowley

For gardeners in the Northern Hemisphere, few spots are more challenging than the areas along north-facing walls. While the spaces along east-facing and west-facing walls receive at least a few hours of morning or afternoon sun, the areas along north-facing walls receive almost no direct sunlight. This means you must choose plants that either prefer shade or at least tolerating it. Further, these spaces are often fairly dry, which limits your choices even further.

Fortunately, there are suitable plants in every category—colorful bedding annuals, flowering perennials, climbers, ground-covers, and shrubs—that will grow quite nicely in the challenging conditions created along north-facing walls. Many of these plants will also tolerate some sun, meaning that you can also plant them along east-facing and west-facing walls.

Here are 11 good choices for ornamental plants to use in the challenging shady locations along north-facing walls.

Shade Loving Flowers and Shady Landscape Planning

Perennials for the north side of the garden

There are gardeners who look around the shady places on their plot with annoyance or sadness and think that nothing will grow here except for the lawn. But in vain. Not only flowers caressed by the sun can cause joy and give beauty. There are those who never come out of the shadows, but that doesn't make them any less beautiful. We will now introduce you to them and tell you where and what to plant.

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Choosing a place to land

It would seem, what is there to choose? The shadow is the shadow. But we will not draw rash conclusions, but rather we will understand the concept of a “shaded place”, because the selection of plants depends on this.

Partial shade is considered to be a garden area where the sun occasionally and briefly but looks in, or where the plants receive a little diffused light penetrating through the foliage of trees. Here for such places you need to choose perennials that grow well in the sun and in the shade. They are called shade tolerant.

A shady corner in the garden can be beautiful

If the sun cannot break through the dense canopy of overgrown trees, or the path of its rays is blocked by the wall of the house, then plants for which the shade is their natural habitat will feel good here. For their love of dark places, they were called shade-loving.

As far as preparing the landing site, everything is simple. It is enough to add a little compost to the planting hole and you can plant plants.

Perennials for partial shade

Fantasies on the theme of multi-colored or single-colour flower beds can be fulfilled using flowering perennials. Among them are aquilegia, astilba, doronicum, forget-me-nots, petunia, aconite, stonecrop, astrantia, mukdenia, rogersia and the well-known panicled phlox.

Among the bulbs, there are also flowers that are not afraid of shaded areas: irises, snowdrops, lilies of the valley, daylily.

Single-varietal iris flower garden

By the way, there is another way to introduce an element of blooming decor into the landscape design of poorly lit areas. Place small flowerpots with flowers, such as evergreen begonias or Waller's balsam. These are very beautiful flowers, but the likelihood that they will survive the winter is very small, so they are planted in flowerpots, and taken home for the winter, where they will continue to bloom.

Such a flowering miracle will delight in the garden in summer and at home in winter

Do not forget about shrubs. With their help, you can create a beautiful decorative composition or occupy empty land near the fence. Hydrangea arborescens and paniculata, derain, volzhanka and another amazing plant, little known, grow well in partial shade. This is a paskonnik. Absolutely unpretentious in care and undemanding to the soil. But it grows very quickly, delighting with lush caps of dark pink or beige inflorescences.

For some reason Paskonnik is not very popular, but in vain - it is beautiful and not picky at all

What grows in the shade

Shade-loving plants, as a rule, have small flowers, collected either in clusters or in small caps. They are more valued for the decorativeness of the leaves - all kinds of sizes, shades and shapes. Even after flowering, shade-loving perennials do not lose their attractiveness and remain so until late autumn.

Hosta, fern, ivy, cimicifuga (black cohosh), bergenia thick-leaved, rusty-spotted sedge feel like royalty.

Just the variety of hosta leaves is breathtaking

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Lovely looking flower gardens are made from low brunners covered with delicate flowers, kupena, primroses, lungworts, helleborus and geyhera. The slender rows of different varieties of astilbe look spectacular with multi-colored fluffy panicles soaring up.

Astilba can be planted in the flower bed and along the borders

Some gardeners, taking advantage of the ability of shade-loving perennials to grow under trees, plant ground covers - periwinkle, wild hoof, creeping tenacious, loosestrife, saxifrage - over time they form a dense green flowering carpet.

By the way, don't be in a hurry to pick up fallen leaves from the trees in autumn. If the foliage is healthy, leave it to hibernate. Under the snow, plants planted in this place will be protected by foliage from freezing; the active spring sun will not quickly dry up the earth here; and over the summer, the gradual rotting foliage forms a fertile loose soil layer.

Shade-loving perennials will give you such a wonderful carpet

As you can see, there is a place for flowers in any corner of your garden. Doubt with the choice of shade-loving and shade-tolerant, please contact us, we will help you correctly distribute these types of perennials on your site.

Plants for the flower garden located on the north side of the house. Flower garden for the lazy. Flowers from the last snow to the first frost

Plants for a flower garden located on the north side of the house. Flower garden for the lazy. Flowers from the last snow to the first frost

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Flower garden for the lazy. Flowers from the last snow to the first frosts
Kizima Galina Alexandrovna

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Plants for the flower garden located on the north side of the house

If the front garden is located on the north side of the house, that is, most of the time it is in the shade, the easiest way to arrange it is by planting coniferous plants: microbiota, elfin, thorny pine» Can also be planted blue or silver spruce.

If you are planting trees, they should be placed at the vertices of a triangle with sides of different lengths, with the tallest tree planted in the background. Plant free space with creeping coniferous plants.

If you use arborvitae, then a tree with a vertical crown can be planted in the middle, and two spherical arborvitae along the edges. So that the front garden does not look symmetrical, erect deciduous shrubs or perennial herbaceous plants of different heights should be planted among conifers. You can plant just one coniferous plant, for example, a microbiota that grows rapidly in all directions, and shade it with perennials.

Spruces and Mountain pine are also best planted one at a time in the center of the front garden or on one side, filling the rest of the space with medium height perennials that will create a bright environment around the plant. But you can leave only one common juniper with a vertical crown, and under it on the sides, place a couple of horizontal junipers. Sow all the free space with bent shoots (short grass), do not mow it (so as not to damage the conifers) and plant small-bulbous plants directly in the grass.

You can also get by with climbing plants - lianas: girlish grapes, climbing honeysuckle- capricole or hops .

In the foreground in front of the lianas (or in a triangle of coniferous plants) you can plant astilba or volzhanka (aruncus). Will grow well and viburnum red.

In the northern front garden, it is convenient to use the evergreen thick-leaved bergenia or various hostas as a border.

Among all these inhabitants of the northern front garden, you can plant clusters of small-bulb flowers that will delight you in early spring before other flowers appear. The most suitable are anemone, as well as kandyk .

Don't forget about two more wonderful plants - Scilla and Galanthus .

This text is an introductory fragment.

Plants for the flower garden located on the north side of the house

Plants for a flower garden located on the north side of the house If the front garden is located on the north side of the house, that is, most of the time it is in the shade, the easiest way to arrange it is by planting conifers: western arborvitae, both with a vertical crown, and

Plants for a flower garden located on the east or west side of the house

Plants for a flower garden located on the east or west side of the house If the front garden is located from the east or west, then it is illuminated by the sun for a significant part of the daylight hours. This means that the choice of plants must be appropriate. From climbing plants

Plants for the flower garden located on the south side of the house

Plants for a flower garden located on the south side of the house If the front garden is located on the south side, then real hybrid clematis can be planted by running them along a decorative nylon mesh fixed directly on the wall of the house. You can plant actinidia, Amur

Plants for a flower garden located on the east or west side of the house

Plants for a flower garden located on the east or west side of the house If the front garden is located from the east or west, then it is illuminated by the sun for a significant part of the daylight hours. This means that the choice of plants must be appropriate. From climbing plants

Plants for a flower garden located on the south side of the house

Plants for a flower garden located on the south side of the house If the front garden is located on the south side, then real hybrid clematis can be planted by running them along a decorative nylon mesh fixed directly on the wall of the house. You can plant actinidia, Amur

I want to plant a vine around the house, for example, actinidia, but I don’t know how deep the trench should be and at what distance from each other to plant plants?

I want to plant a vine around the house, for example, actinidia, but I don’t know how deep a trench should be made and at what distance from each other to plant plants? The trench should be dug to a width of 50 cm and the same depth. One plant from another can be planted at a distance of 1.2-1.5 m

Section VII. Berry bushes for the northern zone

Section VII. Berry bushes for the northern zone Above, we mentioned that currants and raspberries can also be planted in northern conditions. These berry crops can become a vegetable garden hedge. In any other zone, currants, gooseberries, raspberries can be found on any backyard

Plants for the flower garden located on the north side of the house

Plants for a flower garden located on the north side of the house If the front garden is located on the north side of the house, that is, most of the time it is in the shade, the easiest way to arrange it is by planting conifers: western arborvitae, both with a vertical crown, and

Plants for a flower garden located on the east or west side of the house

Plants for a flower garden located on the east or west side of the house If the front garden is located from the east or west, then it is illuminated by the sun for a significant part of the daylight hours. This means that the choice of plants must be appropriate. From climbing plants

Plants for the flower garden located on the south side of the house

Plants for a flower garden located on the south side of the house If the front garden is located on the south side, then real hybrid clematis can be planted by running them along a decorative nylon mesh fixed directly on the wall of the house. You can plant actinidia, Amur

3. All four sides

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Flower garden arrangement

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Selection of plants for the flower garden

Selection of plants for a flower garden A competent selection of plants for a flower garden located on a garden plot allows you to admire flowers from early spring to late autumn. At the very beginning of spring, when the snow has not completely melted, and the buds are just beginning to swell on the trees,

Which side to sharpen

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