I have a miserable dry shade/Norway maple root patch. The only things that have survived there are lily-of-the-valley, epimedium, sweet woodruff and hellbore. I'm about to plant some euonymus groundcover, too.

I ammend the soil every year with compost, leaf mulch and whatever organic material I can find. It has helped enrich the soil and hold moisture better, and the shade-loving plants with shallow roots manage to sneak in between the maple roots.

I have dry shade under several Norway maple's (the neighbours' trees). We just moved in last October. What is doing well includes Ostrich fern, goutweed (trying to keep it in cheque), Solomon's Seal, Wood Poppy, some wood sedges, foam flower, wild ginger, moneywort (also called creeping jenny), lots of European violets, and periwinkle. A cupplant is growing amazingly well and is flowering, but is half the expected size (we also have a sun garden we care for in another location). The native plants are quite vigorous and push out the aliens. The soil is basically pure sand with about an inch of really crummy topsoil. We mulch with cocoa beans.

In the more sunny area (part shade, 3 hrs+ sunlight and then dappled sun for the rest of the day), we have cleared some lawn and planted more native wildflowers and grasses to see how they will do. They include Bottlebrush grass, Echinacea, Black-eyed Susans, Nodding Wild Onion, Liatris spicata, and others. We created a bog using a tarp and the plants in there are doing quite well. We just put in a Datura.

There's not much lawn left, but I am trying to revitalize it. I put down a good triple-mix for top dressing, superseeded and it seems to be coming back. In October I'll put down some organic fertilizer on the lawn.

I've never gardened on sand before. It's kind of interesting in a perverse way.

Joanne

I have a maple that I just began planting around this spring. With our rocky, heavy clay soil, we actually had to dig some of the holes with a post hole digger. I dug holes, amended, then planted and covered the whole area with shredded mulch. I didn't want to disturb the soil around the tree too much for fear of killing it and I only used a thin layer of mulch, probably just an inch or so. I planted lancifolia hosta, fringed bleeding hearts, yellow corydalis, plain green brunnera, two kinds of lamium, epimedium, ostrich and cinnamon ferns, as well as another fern I got from my mother's yard that I don't know the name of. I also just put in a pot of sweet woodruff and there are a few violets that were growing there anyway and I left them - anything green and growing there is good! I also scattered around a few white impatiens for that "glow" white flowers add to shade. Everything is doing well with the exception of the ostrich and cinnamon ferns. They are growing, but they're very small. I don't think they're getting enough moisture or light so I plan to move them next year. I planted most of it later in spring after they had already flowered, but the plants themselves are doing well. We've had an unusually large amount of rain this year and I have been watering in-between since it's a dry shade area, so I don't know how much that has contributed to my success this year. And I don't know how well anything will flower next year. It gets a couple of hours or so of morning sun in spots and dappled light for the rest of the morning until it's all shade in the afternoon.

Lisa