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  Touch-me-not (Impatiens). To be magickally used when time is of the essence. Another folk name is “Busy Lizzy.” The most popular annual shade bedding plant, impatiens come in a wide variety of colors and patterns. Easy to grow and free blooming, they are a great border plant for adding seasonal color to shade gardens. Impatiens are annuals and will not survive a frost or any cold temperatures. Try white and pastel-colored impatiens for moonlight gardens.

  Types of Shade and Plant Suggestions

  Types of shade will vary from garden to garden. Understanding what type of shade you are working with will make it easier for you to achieve success in the garden. There are varying degrees of shade: partial shade (sometimes called dappled), medium shade, and full shade.

  Partial Shade is to be found in areas that receive three to six hours of sunlight per day, or dappled sunlight all day. This dappled type of shade is usually found under the canopies of younger trees or older trees with a higher, more open canopy. Try these magickal flowering herbs: angelica, betony, catmint, coneflowers, obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana), foxglove, heliotrope, iris, lady’s mantle, lilies, mallows, meadowsweet, mints, and soapwort.

  Medium Shade can be classified as an area that is shady during the brightest hours of the day (the hours from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.). This type of garden will catch some early morning rays if it faces the east or, conversely, late evening sun if the garden faces the west. Try these mystical plants and shrubs: astilbe, bleeding heart, coleus, ferns, forget-me-nots, hosta, monarda, impatiens, lobelia, lungwort (Pulmonaria species), and European wild ginger. Try planting these shrubs at the back of your shade garden for structure: oak leaf hydrangea, big leaf hydrangeas, and viburnum.

  Full Shade exists beneath the canopies of mature trees that have thick foliage, or in areas where shadows are cast by a neighboring house or garden structure, such as a shed or a privacy fence. These gardens may receive only a few hours of sunlight per day. These plants should perform well for you: bugleweed (Ajuga), columbine, dead nettle, ferns, ivy, lily of the valley, mints, Solomon’s seal, tansy, and the violet.

  A black cat among roses,

  phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon,

  the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-

  scented stock. The garden is very still.

  It is dazed with moonlight,

  contented with perfume . . .

  Amy Lowell, the Garden by Moonlight

  Flowers and Foliage for Moonlight Gardens

  There is something entrancing about a moonlight garden. Moonlight gardens are all about fragrance, subtle color, and atmosphere, with the emphasis placed on flowers that release their perfumes after sundown. Fragrance is often our most powerful memory trigger. I still associate lilacs with my Grandma Doris. She had huge lilac shrubs growing alongside her house in the city. When I was a child, my sister and I used to play underneath and inside of them—it was like being inside a fragrant, purple cave.

  Color is an all-important aspect of moonlight gardens. Pastel colors, silvery or pale green foliage, and as many white blooming plants as you can find will perform their own magick at twilight. Flower colors that really pop at night include white, cream, yellow, and pale pink. If you want to try your hand at moonlight gardens, look for those colors in bedding plants this year. You can add some of these colors to the perennial garden layout on page 78.

  Shady or Moonlight Garden Layout

  1 Hosta

  2 Impatiens

  3 Lady's Mantle

  4 Columbine

  5 Foxglove

  6 Ferns

  7 Lily of the Valley

  8 Forget-me-nots

  If you have sunny gardens and would like to try growing a moonlight garden, try these annual plants: geraniums, cleome, allysum, stock, cosmos, and white and yellow zinnias. Just to make things interesting, try adding dark purple petunias—not for their color, for their fragrance. You won’t be able to see those velvety-looking purple blooms at night, but trust me, you won’t have to. The fragrance they pump out after sundown will lead you right to them every time. Want to try a fragrant blooming shrub? The white variety of the lilac is another sunny garden option. Here is a tip: All varieties of blooming plants that are white will have the term alba behind the name.

  For a night-fragrant blooming bulb, try the perfumed fairy lilies (Chlidanthus fragrans) and Madonna lilies (Lilium candidum). The Madonna lily is an excellent magickal plant, with the attributes of protection and breaking love spells. The flower is also sacred to the Lady.

  For an easy to grow perennial, try other varieties of daylilies (Hemerocallis). Hit the nursery early in the season, before Mother’s Day, for the best selection. Many daylilies are fragrant, and the paler the color, the more they will stand out in your moonlight garden. Look for these varieties: Green Ice, a pale yellow flower with a green throat; Fairy Tale Pink, a pink flower with a pale green throat; Happy Treasure, a yellow and rose-pink mixture, and Java Sea, a neon-yellow bloom with an acid-green throat. For the magickal associations, match up the colors of the blooms with your Flower Color Magick Chart.

  Nicotiana (pronounced niko-SHEE-anna), the flowering tobacco, has a pale green variety that is very aromatic at night. These star-shaped annuals are another beloved flower that I add to my gardens every year. Nicotiana will last until frost and requires only occasional dead-heading to keep them blooming at their peak all summer long. If the flower production fades, cut them back to the leaves and they will shoot up again and bloom with more vigor. Also available in reds and pinks, try to get as many of the white and pale green as you can find. Your nose will be glad that you did. Nicotiana’s magickal qualities are healing and purification.

  Pale climbing roses, such as New Dawn, are a bewitching choice to climb over an arbor. A lovely ivory-pink color, climbing New Dawn is rated one of the best climbers for the Midwest region. Other climbing vines include the white clematis, wisteria, honeysuckle, and night-blooming jasmine. Any of these would be gorgeous alternatives.

  It is with flowers as with moral qualities;

  the bright are sometimes poisonous,

  but I believe never the sweet.

  Park Benjamin, American Editor

  (1809‒1864)

  Shady Characters and Poisonous Plants

  Some of my favorite cottage garden plants for the moonlight/shade garden are, unfortunately, poisonous: lily of the valley, moonflower vine (Impomea alba), and white and yellow foxgloves. I bided my time and waited until my kids were older before I planted these. You may want to do the same. There is a list of poisonous plants at the end of this section.

  The first year we grew moonflower vines in the garden, all of the neighborhood kids started hanging out in the backyard to watch the moonflowers bloom. Every night at dusk the kids would show up to watch them open. Some evenings it would be just my family on the back patio enjoying the show. Other nights we had anywhere from six to a dozen kids and their assorted lawn chairs spread out across the garden. (And yes, the kids were supervised.) I even had a neighbor videotape the six-inch blooms as they shuddered open one evening.

  As the moonflowers start to unfurl, they tremble and quiver. Before your eyes they slowly open up, like in a time-lapse special effect. The scent is haunting and downright enchanting. On an interesting note, moonflowers will attract both hawk moths and luna moths to your garden.

  Moonflower vines are something that we continue to grow every year. (As I have no toddlers running amok through the garden, the moonflowers are safe enough for growing up the privacy fence.) If one of my young nieces or nephews should arrive, they are never left unsupervised in the garden anyway.

  Another fascinating plant is the datura or angel’s trumpet (Datura inoxia subspecies). This is a gothic witch garden plant, with a capitol G for gothic and grim. It is an absolutely extraordinary night-scented flower, but I want to
warn you to be careful with this plant! They are incredibly poisonous.

  As a young gardener who didn’t know any better, I once bought a home-grown shade plant from a vender at a flea market. He had photographs of it in bloom and he told me that the plant was called a “moonflower bush.” Captivated with my find, I planted it in my shade garden, fertilized it, and watched. As the summer progressed, it started to form huge trumpet-shaped buds.

  The first time that it bloomed was on the night of a full moon. Excited by the timing, I checked on it periodically throughout the evening to discover that the flower had an amazingly heady, musky-lemony fragrance. It was so strong that it made my stomach turn over, and it immediately made me suspicious. I sat down in the garden and had a little chat with this two-foot plant. My shade gardens are behind a privacy fence and under old maple trees, so I settled there under the full moon, alone and unobserved.

  I closed my eyes and held my hands out over the blooms and asked (in my mind) for the plant to tell me who it really was. The answer that came into my mind was just one word . . . death. I fell over backward in my haste to get away from the plant and scooted away from a safe distance of three feet to stare at it.

  “Okay,” I said to myself, as my heart pounded hard in my throat, “that was different.”

  I had never had anything like that happen to me before. I wanted another opinion. So, after a few moments, I called all the kids outside and showed them the plant. I told them nothing of my “discovery” and asked them what they thought about it. My kids are usually a fool-proof barometer if something is wrong, whether it’s people or situations. To my consternation all three of them frowned and two of the three made no move to touch it. My second son started to reach out and then yanked his hand away at the last moment. (He’s the one with the most pronounced psychic abilities, I might add.) They all told me immediately that they didn’t like it. Since the children were young at that time, I warned all three of them to stay away from it until I could correctly identify this “moonflower bush.” I then herded everyone inside to wash their hands, just in case.

  The next day I headed to the library and hit the books. To my dismay I discovered that my moonflower bush was actually a datura. All parts of this plant—flowers, leaves, and seed pods—are extremely toxic. It was even in capital bold-faced letters in all the books: ALL PARTS OF THIS PLANT ARE DEADLY. Damn. Well, I learned my lesson. So much for buying unmarked flowers. It was a lovely plant and I didn’t want to just kill it. I kept the kids away from it and then when it started to fade and set seed pods, I used surgical gloves and ripped the plant out and disposed of it inside of a few garbage bags. I had my husband carefully apply a weed killer on the area, just in case I missed anything.

  The other perennials eventually crept back in but, to this day, nothing will grow in the original spot where the datura was planted. After a while I planted an oak leaf hydrangea shrub (Hydrangea quercifolia) in the area. Its off-white, cone-shaped blooms are an accent to the shade/moonlight garden, as are its orange leaves in the fall. One of my favorite blooming shrubs, this hydrangea has grown well and it now covers up the bare spot. Magickally, you may use the bark of hydrangeas to ward off negativity and for hex breaking.

  For more shady/moonlight garden perennials, try campanula, pale yellow daffodils, snowy white tulips, snowdrops, spiderwort, the pearly astilbe Snowdrift, and white phlox. Some other varieties of herbs that will thrive in shade are angelica, which will grow best for you in part shade, as will mallows and catnip. As mentioned before, pastel impatiens and white begonias are charming additions, as they will stand out well at night in a shady bed. Silver lamb’s ears and the white-edged hosta are also good choices. Chartreuse shades of the hosta are an option for foliage that will glow after sundown. Finally, to accent your moonlight garden, string up a strand of white lights to add a magickal sparkle.

  Poisonous Garden Plants

  By no means is this list all inclusive, it is only meant to be informative. There are many other poisonous plants that are not represented here. If you are interested in pursuing this topic further, check with your local botanical garden or call your county’s Master Gardeners for more information. Also, there are several excellent “Poisonous Plants” websites available to you on the Internet. Some of the best are from Cornell University, North Carolina State University, and Pennsylvania University.

  If situations occur where poisoning concerns exist, then I recommend contacting a poison control hotline right away. The National Poison Control Hotline (for adults and children) is 1-800-222-1222. This number will connect you to your local hotlines. The National Animal Poison Control Center’s number is 1-888-426-4435.

  Please note the * denotes popular landscaping shrubs that are toxic when eaten in large quantities.

  Amaryllis

  American holly

  Azaleas

  Angel’s trumpet (Datura)

  Baby’s breath

  Baneberry

  Belladonna

  Blackberry lily

  Bleeding heart

  Bittersweet

  Bouncing bet (seeds are toxic)

  Burning bush *

  Caladium

  Chinese lantern

  Clematis

  Coleus

  Crocus (all parts)

  Daffodils

  Daphne (berries are toxic)

  Datura

  Delphinium, a.k.a. larkspur

  Dock

  Dutchman’s breeches

  Flax

  Four o’clock

  Foxglove

  Helleborus

  Niger

  Hyacinth

  Hydrangea *

  Great lobelia, cardinal flower

  Iris (rhizomes)

  Jack-in-the-pulpit

  Japanese honeysuckle (berries)

  Lantana

  Lily of the valley

  Lobelia

  Monkshood (Aconite), a.k.a. wolf’s bane

  Moonflower (mildly toxic)

  Morning glories (mildly toxic)

  Oak leaf hydrangea *

  Oleander

  Peace lily

  Plumbago

  Poinsettia

  Pokeweed (all parts)

  Poppies

  Rhubarb (the leaves)

  Rue

  Stonecrop (Sedum)

  Snow-on-the-mountain

  Sorrel

  Star of Bethlehem (Orithogalum umbellatum)

  Sweet pea

  Tobacco

  Tomato (foliage )

  Trumpet creeper

  Virginia creeper (highly toxic)

  White snakeroot

  Windflower

  Wisteria

  Yew

  Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,

  Perennial pleasures plants,

  And wholesome harvest reaps.

  Amos Bronson Alcott

  Samhain/Harvest Pumpkin Garden

  Here are some tips and tricks that I have learned over the years while growing pumpkins, gourds, and Indian corn. My husband, kids, and I have been raising pumpkins and fall ornamentals for years. We select the ones we want for ourselves and then we invite all of our nieces and nephews over (at last count there were fifteen of them) to choose their pumpkins. My sisters-in-law pick from the gourds, mini pumpkins, and corn to decorate their homes. See a sample garden layout on page 88.

  In late September, my kids set up a little pumpkin stand in the front yard and then sell their harvest to the neighborhood families for Halloween. We don’t make a huge amount of money, they do it for fun. I split the profit in half, and divide it between the three of them and let them spend the first half however they want. The other half of the money is put away for Yule, for th
eir gift exchange with each other.

  Growing

  First things first. You need a lot of space to grow pumpkins. If you are limited to a small backyard vegetable garden, try the mini varieties such as Baby Boo or Jack Be Little. Pumpkins require very fertile, rich soil. We grow our pumpkins down at the family farm. The soil at the farm is incredibly black and rich, as it’s flood-plain soil. However, we still make our hills for the pumpkins with bags of composted manure—not raw manure, the composted kind that you buy in twenty-five pound bags at the garden center.

  For my part of the country, farmers recommend having your pumpkins and gourds planted by June 7. I live in zone 5. Check with the local farmers or your county’s extension office to see what planting time they recommend.

  For directions in planting Indian or ornamental corn, check the seed packet for variety-specific planting dates, which are usually after the last frost date, when the soil temperature is warm, at least sixty-five degrees. Plant in side-by-side rows for pollination purposes, and try a nitrogen-rich fertilizer for the corn.

  Stake your pumpkin hills with a tall stake when you plant the seeds. Pumpkin foliage grows anywhere from one foot to three feet tall, and then you can’t find the hills to water them. (Learned that lesson the hard way, myself.) Don’t step on the vines! Fertilize your pumpkins regularly with a water-soluble fertilizer like Miracle-gro.

  Watch for signs of squash beetle activity and be prepared to dust the pumpkins. I recommend Sevin, or Bug Be Gone. It’s an all-purpose powdered pesticide that kills those bugs. Sevin is a fairly safe chemical to apply topically to pumpkins and other vegetables. It is not absorbed into the plant, and washes off easily (the residual life of Sevin is fairly short). Dust safely! Wear a mask and gloves. The first time I grew pumpkins I announced that we would not use any chemicals. We had a beauty of a crop that year, too, hundreds of them. Then the squash beetles found us. They attach themselves to the vines and drain all the juice out of the pumpkins, so they look like deflated playground balls. The attack of the vampire pumpkin bugs! Nasty. We lost the entire patch that year, and I changed my mind about chemicals.