The easy pale pink flower that blooms in full shade (and requires almost no pruning)

How might you embrace shady spaces in your garden? Well, planting shade-loving plants is a good pace to start and this one is striking!

An Astilbe plant in bloom with fuzzy feather-like plumes. Credit: Pixabay

If youre finding it difficult to maintain luscious blooms and foliage in your summer garden or wish to have a little change an savour the opportunities that are possible with the grace of cooling shade, why not consider planting a particular shade-loving perennial that will brighten up any dark corner?

Natural habitat and placement

False Goat’s Beard (Astilbe biternata) is a species of the genus, Astilbe (of the family Saxifragaceae), and is also known as Appalachian false goat’s beard. This American species is thought to be deried from an ancestral species which originated in continental Asia.

False Goat’s Beard is native to southeastern and central Appalacian mountains and thrives in cool, deeply shaded, an damp forested environments. In its natural habitat it might be found in water seeps, on shaded north-facing road banks, in rich mountain cove forests and damp woodland slopes.

The plant requires protection from intense afternoon sun to avoid scorching its leaves, so would be well suited to continuous canopy cover. It prefers nutrient rich loamy or sandy soils with slightly acidic, neutral, to alkaline pH.

A. biternata is drought–intolerant and requires consistent damp soil, though well-draining, so as not to become waterlogged. This being said, this plant does well when planted in a shaded position beside ponds and seeps.

Planting under trees is ideal but