Designing a dry shade garden under a mature tree

This bed sits under a mature American holly right by the entrance to our backyard. It looks like a pretty simple shady spot, but the conditions change a lot within a very small area: dry, root-filled soil closer to the tree, heavier clay toward the front, and very little rain reaching the ground under the canopy. In this video I’m showing how I worked through those conditions and designed the planting around them - from choosing and laying out the plants to working around the existing roots and adding drip irrigation to help everything establish. I garden in the Raleigh, North Carolina area, zone 8a, on a wooded property with a lot of mature trees, so dry shade and root competition are conditions I work with often. If you’re trying to figure out a difficult area in your own garden, you can find my Garden Studio here: https://bloommap.cc/garden-studio The planting includes reblooming oakleaf hydrangeas, Sarcococca confusa (sweetbox), cast iron plants (Aspidistra), Carex ‘Evergold’, and an October Magic camellia. Rather than treating the whole bed as one “shade” condition, I designed around the differences in light, moisture, soil, and root competition throughout the space. Chapters 00:00 The difficult site 00:25 Erosion and the temporary grass 00:58 Dry shade, roots and changing soil 02:02 Designing the planting 04:07 Choosing the plants 05:01 Working around mature tree roots 05:52 Planting and irrigation 07:04 The finished bed 07:43 What I’ll watch over the next year BloomMap Garden Garden design for difficult, established yards. #DryShadeGarden #GardenDesign #ShadeGarden