Wisconsin Natives for Shade

by Dawn Rae Jones, Retail Manager, Bloch’s Farm, Green Lake

One of the hardest planting situations to deal with for many gardeners is deep shade, especially if you want to utilize plants that are native to Wisconsin in your garden.  I’d like to share with you my favorite native plant picks for shade to help you along in your  gardening endeavors.

A great native plant to use in dense shade is the red baneberry, actaea rubra.  The plant itself has serrated leaves and a bushy appearance.  When its white flowers open, the petals fall off, leaving the white stamens.  Following that, shiny red berries are produced.  The berries, however, can cause illness if eaten by humans.  There is also a white baneberry, actaea pachopoda..  The two plants are very similar except the white baneberry has white berries with a single black dot on each berry, thus giving it its common name of Doll’s Eyes.  Both plants thrive equally well in a moist, shady area.

The large-leaved aster, aster macrophyllus, is a great native for dry shade areas.  It has very large heart-shaped leaves that can block out other vegetation.  When it flowers, it creates delicate, pale blue to white flowers above the foliage that are about one inch wide.  It will flower from mid-summer into early fall.  The large-leaved aster looks right at home under groupings of established deciduous trees.

A couple of beautiful blue bloomers for the wet shade area are the tall bellflower, campanula americana, and Virginia bluebells, mertensia virginica.  Both natives are common in the southern half of Wisconsin.  The bellflower likes moist soil, deciduous wooded areas and forest edges.  It can reach anywhere from three to six feet tall.  When in bloom the stem is covered with clear blue, five-petal flowers with a white ring in the center of each flower.  Virginia bluebells averages ten to twenty-four inches tall and has clusters of one inch long tubular flowers that bud out pinkish and then turn a striking blue. 

Lastly, no shade area would seem complete without columbine, aquilegia canadensis.  Typically in bloom from April until June, the columbine can reach up to two feet tall.  It has reddish upside-down tubular flowers shaped like bells that have yellow tips.    Columbine thrives in a dry, rocky terrain, open deciduous areas, and shade.  This plant is fun for children who will enjoy nibbling on the spurs of the flowers to taste its honey-flavored nectar.  Columbine is a favorite for hummingbirds as well, another added bonus.

Using these flowering natives in combination with ferns like the maidenhair, lady, ostrich, cinnamon, interrupted, or the Christmas variety, will give you a very natural look and bring back some of the shade-dwellers that belong in your backyard .  So plant shade natives, sit back, watch, listen, and enjoy the shady setting the way Wisconsin intended it to be.