Full sun, part sun or full shade?

Garden designers and landscape gardeners in Glasgow and beyond make a point of choosing the right plant for the right place when they are creating planting plans for their garden designs. One of the many factors that garden designers need to consider is the light conditions that particular plants need to survive or thrive - you will have seen the symbols on plant labels for full sun, part sun or full shade.

Have you ever wondered what descriptions on the back of plant labels actually mean? Sometimes all you have to work with are a series of symbols which do not always make life easier! The fact of the matter is, there are a few key pieces of information that should dictate where you put the plant in your garden, or perhaps whether you should buy the plant at all. In the world of garden design and landscape gardening, we use several principles of plant selection, and these are simply more in-depth considerations of exactly what the strange little symbols are pertaining to! Garden designers and landscape gardeners in Glasgow as well as everywhere else will be aware of the climate of their area, but with regards to this aspect of garden design, the precise conditions and micro-climate of a particular garden are key.

The first of these symbols is often a sun, half sun, or shade symbol. This is the first of the principles of plant selection – light. Light is one of the critical ingredients of photosynthesis, necessary in some form or other for all plants to survive. Whilst many plants will cope with a number of different positions within your garden, if you put your plant where it will be happiest you are more likely to be rewarded with a lush and healthy specimen. Plants that require ‘full light’ need a minimum of 6 hours of direct light (i.e. not in the shade). An example of this kind of plant would be something like the beautiful Globe Thistle – a real favourite with many garden designers and landscape gardeners and they are plants that are hardy enough to thrive in Glasgow.

Many plants will have a full sun and a half sun symbol, the latter symbol signifying ‘half light’. This is defined as 3 to 6 hours of direct light. If the plant has both symbols it means it will tolerate anything above 3 hours of light. A good example of a shrub that fits this category is the Elder (Sambucus nigra), of which my favourites are the purple varieties with lovely, subtly pink flowers. These shrubs can grow pretty big but will respond well to being hard-pruned every March so you can keep a check on their size easily. The trickiest category is the symbol signifying shade-loving plants. ‘Full shade’ plants will cope with 3 or fewer hours of light per day. These rarities are for those dark and shady corners of your garden, and can include ferns or a number of big-leaved plants such as Hostas, their big leaves helping them soak up as much sun as possible. A slightly more interesting choice that many garden designers like is Astrantia maxima, a beautiful and very tough herbaceous perennial (meaning that it dies back in the winter but then comes back in each spring).

Tom Angel of Angel Horticulture Ltd provides everything from garden design & planting plans, through to surveying sites for japanese knotweed and Himalayan balsam.