April Container Garden Tour – Shady Garden Inspiration

What a difference a month makes! In March my garden was pretty bare and plants were just slowly starting to wake up from their winter dormancy. Now Spring is in full swing and garden becomes more lush with each day. Today I invite you for a container garden tour in april.
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🌿 Other Videos You Might Enjoy Watching 🌿:

▶️ 10 Plants & Flowers For a Shade Container Garden
https://shorturl.at/mtwAE

▶️ 10 Fruits & Vegetables That Grow In Shade – Container Gardening
https://shorturl.at/tuCMW

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#containergardentour #balconytour #containergarden

Hi everyone! Welcome to this new video, it’s time for another monthly container garden tour, to show you some updates and some highlights of the month. This time whenever I talk about a plant I’m going to place plant name on the screen, that’s something that someone suggested recently and I think that’s such a great idea! Cause obviously it can be hard to understand those botanical names sometimes, so whenever I’ll talk about a plant I’m going to place the plant name on the screen, so it’s easier for you to understand and if you’re are interested in certain plant you can just take a screenshot or write it down and search for that plant yourself. But before we begin maybe a couple of words of introduction, because there’s a quite a lot of new people who recently subscribed to the channel, so if you’re new here – Hi I’m Dominika, I’m a professional horticulturist and I also happen to be a balcony gardener. I garden on this balcony located in France in zone 8, we have cold winters and hot and humid summers and my balcony is Northeast facing, so it’s in the shade as you can see for most of the day, it only gets a couple of hours of morning sunlight in summer. It’s also really windy in here, especially in the spring spring is our windiest season, these past couple of weeks were absolutely insane, strong winds and heavy rain, many of my plants have suffered quite a bit of damage, for example my beautiful Japanese maple that I’m going to show you in a moment got literally picked up and tossed across the balcony, so it can get a little bit scary sometimes in here, with the wind, but other than that um the garden has woken up from its winter dormancy and it never ceases to amaze me how fast our spring season progresses. Like, if you watched my tour from last month, from March you will notice that everything was just like pretty much bare and the plants were just barely starting to wake up and now we are one month later and it’s like almost summer already, the spring doesn’t last very long, it’s literally between March and April that’s our spring and then may is already summer. I’m planting my summer planters in may already, so that spring season progresses really really rapidly. So as we go, I’m going to also show you some clips from earlier this month when the spring bulbs were in full bloom because right now there’s not much of those spring bulbs left so let’s go let me show you how the balcony looks mid April. So let’s go out on the balcony like I would normally go out when I check on my plants so through the kitchen and from here we can either turn to the right or we can turn to the left and we will start with the left here. So as we go to this corner of the balcony I want to transform this corner into my vegetable garden, so I want to grow only edibles in here and as of right now I have my two blueberry bushes ‘Pink Lemonade’ and ‘Brigitta Blue’. I have some alpine strawberries here and here some radish in these two planters and then in these galvanized buckets I recently transplanted my lettuce, lettuce Batavia, I seeed some arugula in here I also have some parsley and I’m also going to be planting more herbs probably in these two containers later in summer. Over here we have this absolutely massive Hydrangea, Hydrangea ‘Blueberry cheesecake’ it’s an absolute stunner, and as you can see it started to produce flower buds already. As we turn around this is how the balcony looks from this side and the first thing that I want to show you in here is my new Clematis, Clematis jackmanii, that’s growing really really rapidly on this new arch that I just added recently over my bench, on this side we have some Scabiosa that started to produce flowers already such a lovely perennial for partial shade on the floor we have some Ranunculus, that I planted from corms in the spring so because they are spring planted they will bloom in summer and over here there is a Salix tree woven Salix so I bought this plant on a Plant Festival I believe couple of years ago and in fact it’s not one single plant when you look at this from up close each one of those stems each one of those twigs is a separate plant so they just gathered a bunch of twigs they twisted it together planted in it in a container and this is how it grows and it’s going to create a lovely canopy of green leaves in summer. I mean already started to leaf out but obviously as the season progresses it’s going to get more and more beautiful as we move forward this little grouping of plants on the floor here we have evergreen fern, and we have some last tulips left as I said most of my tulips are now done blooming but these are one of the last remaining ones these are called Healthcare tulips and aren’t they absolutely stunning and so unique looking? This is a fairly new variety I believe they were, they are available on the market since the pandemic. they are called Healthcare and I think they were um made kind of in honor to all the healthcare workers during the pandemic such a beautiful tulip. I won’t be keeping the bulbs because usually Tulips bulbs don’t come back well from year to year so uh it’s not worth keeping them but I would definitely want to plant them again on my balcony. And here are some other Tulips and spring bulbs that I grew on my balcony this year we have tulip Miss Elegance, Daffodil Thalia and Tulip Infinity And as we turn around and we look at this area from here there’s another grouping of plants on the floor this is Lily Candy Blossom beautiful pink Lily with double blooms uh and I’m keeping them as perennials so that’s why they’re already so large, normally I’d be just planting lilies now, but since they are perennials they already started to grow. Behind we have a rose, climbing rose, this is an experiment, obviously roses need full sun exposure to grow, at least 6 hours of sunlight a day uh which is not what they are getting on my balcony but this Rose Mary Delany is said to tolerate or is said to grow well with a little bit less than 6 hours of sunlight so um I’m givingnit a try so far so good as you can see it produces healthy foliage and so far it’s growing well. Another little plant that I wanted to show you in here is the Sedum palmeri it’s such a small little plant but it’s just so so cheerful, look at this plant completely covered in yellow blooms. I absolutely love it, it also overwinters on the balcony then in the spring I get to enjoy these beautiful flowers. And one other thing I wanted to show you bees have been nesting in this bee house. I know that it’s like against all rules because the bee house not only is standing on the floor but it’s also next to my window where I’m like walking here several times a day but I initially put this Bee Hotel on my privacy screen over there but the wind, knocked it down on the floor and it kind of crashed so I brought it here I repaired the roof and I just kind of left it in here and all of a sudden bees started to come here to to nest in it, it was like hung on that privacy screen for like 2 years years and nothing happened and the moment I placed it here on the floor uh they started to nest and now it’s been like 3 years that I have bees come in and nesting in this hotel. All right so let’s continue and as we move forward I think the first thing that you’ll see is this absolute stunner Clematis montana ‘Mayleen, that’s in full bloom right now. Absolute stunner it smells divine, I absolutely love the scent it’s just very delicate sweet scent not too overwhelming and it’s covered in flowers. I recently posted a guide on how to grow beautiful Clematises in containers this guide is available to my silver members and I cover everything from the choice of the container to potting mix through fertilizing, pruning and watering… everything, so if you would like to join my membership program you can click the joint button just below the video. All right on this side we have a Hydrangea another Hydrangea, that’s also starting to produce flower buds already and on the other side I recently transplanted yet another Snapdragon this is a taller variety called Snapdragon Lucky Lips. As we move forward Japanese maple Acer ‘Garnet’ looking absolutely stunning, look at this foliage, just gorgeous, gorgeous color there’s another one back there which is called Acer ‘Orange Dream’ and I absolutely love how it changes colors throughout the seasons, it starts as a like yellowish kind of green in the spring then it becomes more charteruse, more lime green and then it becomes completely green like darker green in summer and bright orange in Autumn. Such a beautiful cultivar, but before we start with this shady corner just one look on how the things look from up here, we have some forget-me-nots in these planters, I grew them from seeds and they are now in full bloom looking really cute below we have some Lily, another Lily that I keep as a perennial this one is a little bit beaten up because of the strong winds and then when the Acer fell on the floor I actually had this Lily over there and the Acer kind of smashed the Lily and actually lost I think about three stems uh which is such a bummer. Below we have tiarella, really lovely perennial also great for partial-shade and for full shade and now the shade garden, the area that does not receive any direct sunlight at all. And here we have Podophyllum ‘Spotty Dotty’ such a unique looking plant, I added it to my garden last year, just love these leaves they look so unique and it also blooms I mean it’s about to bloom these funny looking flower buds I believe it has red flowers so I’m really looking forward to to seeing it. Below there is a Hosta ‘Halcyon’ love those velvety heart-shaped leaves such a beautiful color as well this one is really large so it soon will need probably repotting and dividing. Then we have a silver fern, really love this one as well look at those silvery kind of purplish silvery leaves such a stunner. Below yet another great perennial for full shade and partial shade Brunnera, this one is called Variegata I love these forget-me-not like looking flowers. Hakanochloa, another Hydr…. why do I keep calling them hydrangeas, yet another Hosta this one is called Hosta ‘Royal’ beautiful green foliage and just some ornamental grass I have those grasses kind of you know tucked in all over the balcony these are Carex ‘Evergold’ beautiful evergreen quite winter hardy as well and there’s space left for some other plants, as you can see I’m going to be adding a couple of more perennial to my shady garden I’m going to be sharing that with you in the upcoming videos obviously. Okay so this is how the balcony looks mid April I have a lot of things to do this month I’m going to be continuing to transplant my seedlings to their final pots, I have a whole bunch of summer bulbs and tubers to plant which I’m going to share with you in the upcoming videos. So hope that you guys enjoyed seeing this little update on the balcony thank thanks so much for joining me today and we’ll see each other in the next video bye!