Here is a collection of books to teach you about plants and techniques used for gardening with limited amounts of sunlight. Many of you may have beautiful shade trees around the homestead but those trees make it hard to grow anything with the shade they provide. These books may be your inside information on getting a beautiful garden incorporated into your landscape.

The Complete Shade Gardener
by George Schenk

The Complete Shade Gardener by landscape and garden designer George Schenk is an exceptional, well-written and organized guide to shade-gardening for atmosphere, beauty, and personal satisfaction. Black-and-white photographs with an inset selection of color plates illustrate the advice and commentary provided. Also included is a horticultural wealth of background information on a long list of recommended plants to cultivate, how-to instructions for their incorporation into a garden, and a great deal more. The Complete Shade Gardener is an excellent gardening resource and a welcome, practical, highly recommended addition to personal and professional gardening reference collections.

200 Tips for Gardening in the Shade
by Pamela Wolfe

Most urban and suburban yards are shaded at least part of the day, by trees, neighboring buildings, and porches or overhanging eaves, frustrating peoples' attempts to grow sun-loving favorites. These 200 tips show gardeners how to create lovely shade gardens, from assessing their yard's degree of shade to designing a layout, choosing plants, and maintaining them, to compensating for shade by careful watering, mulching, and soil preparation. Trees, vines, and shrubs for shade, tips for woodland gardens with native plants, and suggestions for keeping the garden in bloom season after season are included.

An Encyclopedia of Shade Perennials
by W. George Schmid

Finding an array of unique and diverse plants for shade might seem like a daunting task, with limited options available to the gardener. Author and shade perennial expert W. George Schmid dispels this perception in his new encyclopedia on shade perennials. This companionable reference provides information on more than 7,000 species and cultivars in 184 genera, from Acanthus to Woodwardia---some new to horticulture, others unjustly overlooked, but all eminently suitable for enlivening and thriving in the shade garden.

Schmid has behind him a half century of practical gardening experience, horticultural education, and extensive travel observing shade perennials in their native habitats; readers are therefore treated to both practical growing tips and his personal associations with the plants. Detailed chapters on types of shade, soils, watering, fertilizing, and other challenges peculiar to shade plants and shade gardening open the book, and cultural notes throughout concern cold and heat tolerance, shade intensity, soil conditions, propagation, and pest and diseases. The expert text is rounded out with 500 stunning color photographs, most taken by the author himself.

An Encyclopedia of Shade Perennials successfully combines Schmid’s expertise on shade perennials with touching personal accounts of his experiences as a gardener. Easy-to-read and packed with useful information, this book will be welcomed by gardeners of all regions and levels.

Moss Gardening: Including Lichens, Liverworts, and Other Miniatures
by George Schenk

This handsomely illustrated and thorough treatise is far more than a manual on planting and maintaining moss. The book aims to be of practical help in understanding some of the common mosses, lichens, and liverworts, and in distinguishing them from the familiar non-mosses such as Irish, Scottish, and Spanish "moss." There are descriptions for transplanting, propagating, and growing them as ground covers, in container gardens, and for bonsai arrangements. Exhilarating to gardeners and non-gardeners alike are the fine photographs, ranging from panoramas of moss carpets and temple gardens in Japan to close-ups of sea lettuce-like mosses and spore capsules. George Schenk writes that he is primarily interested in garden art rather than science, but he offers enough of each to inspire broader exploration of these minute, but certainly not minor, plants.

The Natural Shade Garden
by Ken Druse

Shade can be a gardener's curse or delight, depending on how it's managed. Even a heavy grove of mature trees needn't have bare ground beneath; they can be surrounded with any number of shade-loving foliage, grasses, or grasslike ground covers, including galax, dichondra, ivy, vinca, wintergreen, maidenhair fern... the list of possibilities is a long one. Druse himself gardens in the shadow of a Brooklyn brownstone, so his advice is by no means limited to gardeners with woodland acreage. This book also successfully punctures the myth that a shady flower garden must be colored in greens and subtle pastels: a parade of brilliant camellias, columbines, clematis, and primula proves that a shade gardener's crayon box is as varied as any, and the well-organized Druse sorts the herbaceous perennials by color in an addendum at the back of the book.

Eighty Great Natural Shade Garden Plants
by Ken Druse

This companion guide is illustrated throughout with 130 of Druse's spectacular color photographs. All-new descriptions discuss the origins of each plant, supply the pronunciation of their Latin names, and offer information on their ultimate size, time of bloom, light and soil requirements, cold hardiness, and special interest, such as colorful berries or butterfly attraction. Here, too, is indispensable advice for using these plants with companions to create striking designs. Each section has an original introduction presenting valuable techniques for making your own natural garden. An appendix gives mail-order sources.

Taylor's Guide to Shade Gardening : More Than 350 Trees, Shrubs, and Flowers That Thrive Under Difficult Conditions, Illustrated with Color Photographs and Detailed Drawings
by Frances Tenenbaum (Editor), Steve Buchanan (Illustrator)

This comprehensive guide addresses one of the most common problems for gardeners. Shade Gardening has over 250 color photographs of the 350 best trees, shrubs, annuals, perennials, bulbs, ground covers, vines, ferns, and grasses for shaded areas. Articles cover the basics of growing plants in the shade as well as such subjects as city gardens, flowers, foliage plants, pests and diseases, and lawns.