Fruit in Shade

If you have little, or no sunshine in your garden and you want to grow fruit it can be difficult to find anything suitable as most fruiting plants need sunshine.

On a recent visit to the the hospital I picked up an old and tatty The Garden magazine in a waiting room. It was the August 2007 edition and had an article, Fruit in shade.

These are the plants that the article recommends:

Rhubarb
Not strictly a fruit (only the stem is eaten) Rheum x hybridum tolerates part shade and produces well and is a handsome architectural plant if given enough space. NOTE: the leaves are poisonous.

Acid-loving Vaccinium
Good choices for light shade with a reasonable crop are:
Blueberry, Vaccinium corymbosum
Cranberry, Vaccinium macrocarpon
Lingonberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea

I have not come across lingonberry, the article states that it is a low-growing evergreen, that spreads by creeping stems. It is popular in Scandinavia and central Europe. The fruit is pea-sized and sweeter than cranberries but still sharp. It has a second flush of small, pretty flowers while the first crop of fruits is ripening.

Other fruits for neutral or limy soil…

Black Chokeberry, Aronia melanocarpa, tolerates slight shade, a small shrub which produces hawthorn-like flowers and bunches of fruit that look like blackcurrants. Sweeter whn cooked they can be used in preserves.

Redcurrants and Whitecurrants, Ribes rubrum cultivars, tolerate deeper shade. Another worth considering is the buffalo or clove currant Ribes  odoratum which is similar to the larger blackcurrant. A good cropper is Ribes odoratum ‘Crandall’ cultivar, the fruit tastes more like grape than blackcurrant it has yellow, clove scented flowers.

All goosberries, Ribes uva-crispa are excellent for shady gardens, try the new cultivars ‘Hinnonmäki Röd’ or the thornless ‘Pax’ which are disease-resistant and heavy-cropping.

Morello cherries, Prunus cerasus, is a self-fertile cooking cherry is a favourite for north-facing walls as it does not need direct sun to fruit. It can be grown as a free-standing tree or shrub or fan-trained against a wall. It is naturally small but dwarf varieties are also available, ‘Gisela 5‘ and ‘Tabel‘ are suitable for the smallest and shadiest of gardens.

Modern hybrid strawberries, Fragaria x ananassa can stand a little shade but for a better cropper in shady conditions try the alpine strawberry Fragaria vesca. This forms a deciduous groundcover and has small strawberries with an intense taste. There are runnerless varieties of alpine strawberry Fragaria vesca ‘Semperflorens’ it flowers and fruits almost continually through the year popular cultivars are ‘Baron Solemacher‘ and ‘Alexandra‘.

Shady gardens will always be problematic but your they can bear fruit if you choose your plants carefully.

Technorati Tags: blueberry, cherries, chokeberry, fruit, gooseberry, ground cover, rhubarb, Shade Growing, strawberries, vaccinium

Tagged with: blueberry • cherries • chokeberry • fruit • gooseberry • ground cover • rhubarb • Shade Growing • strawberries • vaccinium

Filed under: Fruit for Shade

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!