Light up your shade with these early-spring-flowering natives

Dear Avant Gardener, Right now, I’m struggling with “leaving the leaves” for the bees, etc. It’s difficult to see the hellebores blooming in a prominent shady area in my front yard. I know I shouldn’t blow the leaves. But what about raking some of them and dispersing them in the woods behind my house? — Marla, Williamsburg, VA

Alas, those lovely hellebores are not native. They’re not invasive either, so go ahead and enjoy them. But please consider adding native ephemerals to your woodland garden to feed native bees, while also contributing their delicate beauty. As Rebecca McMackin explains below, we don’t have enough research to know whether an exotic provides healthy nourishment for native insects, but we know the native plants the insects evolved with do. (See “Why” below.)

As for the leaves, feel free to gently remove them from any plants that struggle to break free. Director of horticulture Uli Lorimer and his team at ​Garden in the Woods​ leave leaves in winter as insulation for delicate plants, then gently rake them away in early spring.

[W]e’ve got fairly extensive plantings of ​Phlox divaricata ​and ​Phlox stolonifera, ​so creeping and woodland phlox. And we found that leaving the leaf cover over the winter actually, it’s not a detriment to the plants, but they do need to be uncovered a little bit in the springtime. And so that ends up, again, it’s sort of like protection and insulation for them. And believe it or not, there’s enough light that filters through so they still are able to photosynthesize. But then those are areas that we try to lightly rake free a little bit ahead of spring growth. — ​Uli Lorimer on Away to Garden podcast​

Lorimer recommends planting stronger woodland perennials like Solomon’s seal in areas where winter winds blow deep leaf cover (eight or more inches). Conversely, the Garden in the Woods team plants tiny, delicate plants into moss in areas winter winds blow bare.

We’ll try to help that along and kind of keep those moss patches going, and they end up being the really perfect place to display, what botanists like to call “belly plants,” things that you need to get down on your belly to see. … So things like Houstonia [bluets], things like partridge berry [Mitchella] or trailing arbutus [Epigaea repens], these really delicate, wonderful spring charmers that would just be utterly lost and smothered if the leaf litter got to be too heavy. — Uli Lorimer on Away to Garden podcast

Dear Avant Gardener, I do have a question about using leaf litter for mulch. I'm using it on my raised beds and wonder how to prepare the beds for spring planting of herbs and perennials. Do I need to remove it or work it into the soil or just leave it in place? — Scotti

Go ahead, plant right into those leaves — as long as they’re a few inches or less deep. Deeper layers might retain too much water and encourage fungi inhospitable to herbs and vegetables, though native perennials should be fine.

Happy Spring!

— The Avant Gardener

Why, How, Wow!

Why?

When the vast majority of plants sold at both local nurseries and big box stores are not native, it’s so much easier to buy exotics. And then there’s an emerging narrative about how the benefits of natives to insects is overblown, anyway. But, that’s just hubris: We know too little to say for sure. So, before it’s too late, why not err on the side of planting beautiful natives for the insects that evolved with them?

And I think it’s also just really important to remember that the knowledge that we have about the ways that plants, animals, and fungi all interact is so nascent, and such a tiny portion of what’s actually going on in the world. And even when I think about this over the last decade, the research that’s been done into the chemistry of nectar and pollen and all of the complicated relationships therein, there’s a form of hubris to think that when you see a bee on a flower that is good enough, that box is checked or we’ve done the work ecologically to take care of this ecosystem.

There’s so much more going on that pollen might not have the right nutrients. It might have chemicals that are harming, literally, that bee that’s collecting on it. And then there might be native plants around that aren’t getting pollinated because that bee is sitting on that flower, so it’s such a… We could never know is the point. We never can say that this is good enough. And so why not default to just looking at the plants that evolved around us, looking at the animals that evolved here, and have relationships with those plants, and trying to encourage those communities? — ​Horticulturist Rebecca McMackin in Away to Garden​

Research does confirm that native lawn plants support native bees and caterpillars much more than traditional exotic turfs like Kentucky bluegrass (yes, exotic despite the name) and even much-touted clover. And several great turf replacements — notably wild strawberries, native violets, and bluets — offer up delicate, nectar-filled flowers early in the spring. Plant them into your lawn in part shade or (except bluets) sun this spring or seed them into it in the fall and let them take over.

How

When you think of all the understory plants in forests, you realize there’s a world of greenery growing among the moss and dead leaves beneath the canopy. In fact, there are 479 shade-loving species in Virginia, including 244 perennials. (See "Resource" below for how to search for plants in your state.)

Some of the most beautiful shade-adapted plants are spring ephemerals. They live their entire lifecycle from bloom to seed in late winter or early spring, taking advantage of the sunlight available before deciduous trees leaf out. They’re able to grow quickly once weather warms because they store energy underground in corms, bulbs, or rhizomes. As heat builds and rain lessens in later summer, their leaves often die back and they seem to disappear. It’s best to plant them among ferns and other robust shade-lovers whose leaves endure the heat of summer.

[Claytonia virginica] grows from an underground tuber like a small potato; this has a sweet, chestnut-like flavor. Native Americans and colonists used them for food and they are still enjoyed by those interested in edible wild plants. — ​Wildflower.org​

Wow!

Zoe and I are five weeks into teaching our 13-week ​Transform Your Yard​ online course and soon we will be moving from the "Designing Your Yarden" to the "Planning to Plant" half of the course. One of our students has a gorgeous, shady, boulder-strewn hillside surrounded by forest on a lakeside in Maine. Ephemerals like trilliums, trout lilies, and spring beauties form colonies that flush the woods with delicate pops of color in early spring. When our student selects species of native plants for their mossy woodland hillside, perhaps they'll consider using painted trillium and yellow trout lily, which are both native to Maine. Don’t you just love, love, love them?!

Related Resources

• Wonder whether a plant in your garden is invasive? Search for it in the ​Invasive Plant Atlas.​

• Want to find spring ephemerals native to your county? For local species, you can always check BONAP by genus, e.g., ​Trillium​, ​Erythronium​, and ​Claytonia​.

• Looking for other shade-loving plants? Go to Wildflower.org, scroll to “Combination search,” select your state on the left, and click the box on the right for “Light requirement – Shade.” You can further narrow by type of plant, e.g., shrub or herb (perennial).