A great many British front doors face north, sit under a porch, or get an hour of sun at best. Customers often assume that rules a hanging basket out. It does not — it simply rules out the plants everyone reaches for first. Shade planting, done properly, gives you something softer and more interesting than a sunny basket ever will.
Work out which shade you actually have
Part shade means three to five hours of direct sun, usually morning or late afternoon. Full shade means under two hours, or bright indirect light all day under a porch roof. Deep shade is a covered, enclosed entrance that gets no direct light at all. The first two will grow a beautiful basket. The third needs foliage, not flowers — and looks wonderful for it.
The shade performers
- Fuchsia — the best flowering plant for a shaded British doorway, and it trails beautifully
- Begonia (tuberous and trailing) — big, generous blooms in low light
- Busy Lizzie (impatiens) — flowers hard in shade where almost nothing else will
- Trailing lobelia — cool blues and whites that read brighter in dim light
- Heuchera — amber and burgundy foliage for months without any sun at all
- Ferns, hostas and variegated ivy — the structure that holds a shade basket together
“In shade, pale colours do the work of bright ones. White, cream, soft pink and silver all lift a dark doorway; deep reds and purples disappear into it.”
What to avoid
Petunias and surfinias, trailing geraniums, bidens, calibrachoa and most Mediterranean herbs all need real sun. In shade they stretch, go leggy, and produce leaves instead of flowers. They are the reason so many people conclude that their doorway "cannot grow anything" — the position was never the problem.
Two things that catch people out
First, a shaded basket still needs watering. A porch roof keeps the rain off entirely, so a basket in the shade under cover can be drier than one in open sun. Second, shade baskets grow more slowly, so they should be planted fuller from the start — there is less growing season ahead of them to close the gaps.
If you are not sure what your doorway gets, tell us which way it faces and whether it is covered. We plant to the position, not to a fixed recipe — which is why a Perenna basket on a north-facing porch looks every bit as full as one in full southern sun.
Written by The Perenna Bloom Team
