My favourite ground cover for shade is Lamium. I love the texture of the leaves (soft and a little furry), I love the colouring and I love how undemanding it is. Unlike other ground covers (for shade) that I’ve tried before, Lamium keeps itself neat and tidy. Regardless of the weather it always looks perky and fresh and as well as it does in shade, it also does well in the sunny areas of my garden. Bugs seems to ignore it and the variegated leaves brighten up deep shade areas and provide a lovely contrast against the other foliage. It spreads itself well by stems rooting as they grow along the ground, but it is not that fast growing that one can call it invasive – in fact, it took its time getting going. It’s a great ground cover (for me) and I love this easy plant.
The variety I have is Lamium maculatum, “Beacon Silver”. If you do an image search on Google it comes up as having tiny, insignificant pink flowers. We first planted the Lamium in June 2010 so it is now in its 15th month in my garden and I’ve never seen it flower. All the literature hardly mentions the flowers so I wasn’t expecting any. I had in fact forgotten that it might at some stage produce flowers. So it was a great surprise today to find that one section of the garden has Lamium flowering! Even more of a surprise is that the flowers are not pink, but tiny little yellow flowers. They are really small … if I hadn’t bent down to remove some weeds I would probably have missed them. They are very cute and were lovely to photograph.
Lamium maculatum “Beacon Silver” …
[one_half]I love this combination[/one_half]
[one_half_last]The unexpected flowers[/one_half_last]
[one_third]The flowers up close[/one_third]
[one_third]Buds up close[/one_third]
[one_third_last]Interesting buds, leaves above[/one_third_last]
[one_half]Stretching up towards the sun[/one_half]
[one_half_last]Last photo, promise![/one_half_last]
The “flowering” Lamium is in a fairly sunny position and I think I fed it recently when I fed the flowering plants around it which might have precipitated the flowers. Whatever, I think they’re kinda cute.
Happy Gardening
xxx