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| Photo Credit: Pennystone Gardens |
| Don’t be afraid to move your plants to different light levels until you find the right spot where they’ll thrive. |
Every plant comes with one – a little plastic label tucked into the pot with an icon on it that lets you know what level of light it needs. It’s surely a tribute to the horticulture industry that plant lines have been developed to keep things so easy and give us gardeners lots of options for design possibilities. But in real life – in nature – “light” is a lot more complex.
Differences in light can be crucial to whether a plant thrives or just sort of limps along. And the more you learn about plants, the more adjectives you’ll find describing the many shades of shade. To top it off, the descriptions of habitats appropriate for natives are open to a lot of interpretation. Of course, this is lots of fun for those who like such challenges, but for most of us, simple is better. So let’s shed some light…on light! “Full sun” means just that – nothing blocks the sunshine from dawn to sunset. This is what you find in the center of a meadow, an old field, a swamp. “Sun” means the “full sun” is trimmed a bit – usually due to tree lines that limit the flow of sunshine to about eight hours a day. (Move a bit closer to the edge of the meadow to find this area.) Most of the time the differences between “full sun” and “sun” are really slight for sun-loving plants, but there are species that insist on a full day or they’ll get grumpy. Along the edge of the meadow – often called “wood edges,” “roadsides” or “larger openings” – we encounter a vexing pair of phrases: “part shade” and “part sun.” Both suggest there’s a full blast of sunshine for part of the day, but these phrases generally imply what part of the day.
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