How to Design a Flower Bed for Shade

Walk through your house looking out each window onto you yard. Planting flower beds in areas that are visible from windows helps bring in the beauty of the outdoors into the home. Take note of the best places from inside the home to see flower beds.

Measure the yard. Multiply the width by the length to obtain the square footage. This will help you decide how much space you have for flower beds in the shade. For example, a perennial English-style flower bed is generally larger than flower beds planted with a few types of flowers because it must be large enough to accommodate a wide range of plants.

Draw a diagram of the yard with your pencil and graph paper. Indicate placement of the house and driveway, as well as any additional features such as a patio, deck, shed, or swimming pools. Note on the diagram how much sun each area receives by spending the day monitoring the yard. An area with full sunlight receives six to eight hours of sunshine; areas with partial sunlight get four to six hours. Full shade is anything less than four hours.

Place a hose on the ground in the shape that you want the flower bed. Choose straight edges for a more formal look, or shape the bed to fit the natural slope of the terrain. Adjust the hose until the bed's shape suits your personal taste. Hammer in stakes every 3 to 4 feet around the hose with a rubber mallet to set the bed's shape.

Dig out grass and weeds in your proposed flower bed using a shovel. By digging out grass and weeds, you avoid exposing any trees near your shade bed to herbicides. Use an herbicide that contains glyphosate on grass if the flower bed is away from trees or shrubs. Wait two weeks to plant if using herbicide.

Plant competitive ground cover like Canada wild ginger, goutweed, bunglewood or sweet woodruff around trees. Ornamental flowers often die out when trying to compete with trees for the soil's nutrients. Ground cover is able to survive with little moisture or nutrients.

Dig holes in the flower bed for shade-loving plants such as impatiens, coleus, perilla, browallia and oxalis. A hole should be twice the size as the plant's root ball and the same depth as the plant was set in its container. Spread a 3- to 4-inch layer of mulch around the bed after planting to keep grass from invading your shade flower bed.