Shade garden design tool
The dark strip under mature trees is where lawns go to die and where the best gardens begin. Shade gardening is texture gardening: since flowers are scarcer, leaf size, shape, and color do the composing. Painted Acre lets you paint the layers under your actual trees and watch the woodland floor close over three or four seasons.
No account needed. The studio opens with this scenario ready to go.
Read your shade before you plant it
Dry shade under shallow-rooted maples is a different planet from moist shade on a north wall. Watch where rain actually reaches and where roots hog it. Under greedy trees, plant small plugs into pockets between roots rather than fighting with a spade, and mulch with leaves, which is what a forest floor wants anyway.
Compose with leaves, not blooms
The classic shade trio is bold, fine, and carpet: bold hosta leaves, fine fern or astilbe texture beside them, and a low carpet knitting the front. Repeat the trio down the bed and vary the hosta colors, blue-green to chartreuse, so the eye travels. Bloom is the seasoning here, not the meal.
Light the dark corners
White and chartreuse read as light in shade. A white-variegated hosta or a drift of white azalea at the darkest point works like a lamp. Put the brightest foliage deepest in the bed and the shadows organize themselves around it.
Before and after, honestly
Every Painted Acre plan starts from a photo of a real yard and ends with the same view, years grown. No invented dream yard, no stock photos.
The understory, painted
Bold leaves, fine textures, and carpets that hold in dry shade, each painted at every age. Enter your ZIP and the palette keeps only what survives your winters.
Hosta
The bold layer; mass three cultivars, blue, green, and chartreuse.
Azalea
The shade shrub that earns its spot twice: spring bloom, evergreen structure.
Flowering Dogwood
An understory tree that turns the shade edge into a spring event.
Pachysandra
Evergreen carpet for the deepest dry shade where nothing else holds.
Lamium
Silver-leaved groundcover that glows in low light.
Lily of the Valley
Old-fashioned fragrance colonizing the impossible corners.
Questions people ask
▸What can I plant under a tree where grass will not grow?
Stop replanting grass and switch to a layered shade bed: hostas and ferns in the root pockets, an evergreen groundcover like pachysandra as the carpet, and leaf mulch instead of bark. It outperforms lawn in exactly the conditions that kill lawn.
▸Will planting under a tree hurt the tree?
Small plugs planted between roots are harmless. What hurts trees is trenching, rototilling, or adding more than a couple inches of soil over the root zone. Never build a raised bed against a trunk.
▸Do shade gardens have any flowers?
Spring is the shade garden flower show, dogwood, azalea, and bulbs bloom before the canopy leafs out. Summer is foliage season, which is why leaf color composition matters more than bloom in shade design.
▸How does Painted Acre handle existing trees?
Your trees are already in the photo, so the painting starts from reality. You design the understory beneath them and the growth view shows the new layers filling in under the existing canopy.
What this is, and is not: Painted Acre produces an illustrative watercolor design plan: placement, plant choices, and an honest picture of growth over time. It is not an architectural, engineering, or construction document. For anything that involves excavation, water, structures, or grading, bring the plan to a qualified contractor or landscape professional and verify measurements, utilities, and local codes first.
Related scenarios
Garden styles
Garden design tool
Not a themed garden, not a landscaping project: a garden. Flowers, shrubs, a bed with a good shape, …
watercolor · pollinator garden Native and pollinatorPollinator garden design tool
A pollinator garden succeeds on two things most sketches ignore: drifts big enough for foraging bees…
watercolor · japanese garden Garden stylesJapanese garden design tool
Japanese garden design is subtraction: fewer plants, placed asymmetrically, each given room to becom…
watercolor · backyard food forest Edible and foodBackyard food forest design tool
A food forest is an orchard designed like a woodland: a tall canopy layer, fruiting understory trees…
watercolor · front yard landscaping Front yard and curb appealFront yard landscaping design tool
Curb appeal is composition: the house is the subject, the landscape is the frame, and most front yar…