View from my couch in the family room. Not bad, although the ivy climbing up the tree in the vacant lot behind us kinda bugs.
Welcome to My Shade Garden
Have you ever become suddenly, weirdly obsessed with something that you’ve never previously given a second thought to?
That happened to me in 2006 when my husband John and I bought an old house on a big, treed lot in a shady suburb north of Seattle. I got bit by the gardening bug as it were. And in the first year, I quickly discovered that any plant requiring full sun was doomed in our garden. Which is kinda ok – I’ve found my niche, right?
What this website is – and isn’t.
This site is dedicated to shade gardening (with a splash of indoor plants). I love gardening, but I’m not an expert. I’m learning over time and am slowly becoming a someone who knows a thing or two. I also have little patience for fussy plants that need lots of attention. Our yard is nearly a half acre and there just isn’t time for that! Our gardens are in progress, imperfect, very Darwinian environments – so plants that do well in our yard will probably do well in yours.
There are a lot of gardening websites. Why make another one?
Although you can find information about shade gardening on many sites, there seem to be few (or none) dedicated to it. So here I am, I’m putting my virtual stake in the ground. I figured if some of the information I’ve collected over the years could help other folks with the shady bits of their gardens, why not put it out there?
Why now?
For the last decade, I’ve dutifully collected nursery tags in an ugly white big binder that’s now bursting at the seams. So last year, in lieu of binder proliferation, I decided to build this website. And I figured because it’s a website, why not add a navel-gazey blog? Maybe include some details about our property and its microclimates? Most importantly, this will hopefully replace that old-school binder with clean, expandable repository of data that is sortable and searchable.
This binder has served me well but I think it’s time to upgrade.
Lastly, this is also a surreptitious web development project. I’m using a subject I’m interested in to help my stick-to-it-ive-ness with the goal of improving the site and my coding skills over time while also keeping track of my gardening exploits.
If you’ve read this far I’m impressed! If you’d like to read even more, sign up for my newsletter. I promise it will be less about me and more about plants! Thanks for stopping by!
