Best Shade Plants for Chicago + How to Plant Them

Madeline Nusser
Dec 9, 2025
8 min read

Updated: Feb 11

Struggling to get plants to grow in your shady Chicago yard? Take it from a professional gardener — with a little planning and the right plants, it's easier than you may think.

Inside this blog post:

How to identify how much shade is in your yard
Best plants for Chicago shade
Design tips to make it easy
Real-world examples of shady yards

When it comes to gardening in Chicago, I’m often asked the same question: "What can I grow in all this shade?" Between narrow lots, tall buildings, garages, and fences, shade is almost unavoidable — including the dreaded deep, dark kind.

Sound familiar? While sun-loving flowers might be off the table, there’s still plenty you can do. I’ve put together this simple guide to help.

In it, you'll find shade-tolerant plants you can source at local garden centers, along with practical design tips and examples from my Toots and Roots projects to show how these ideas actually work in real yards.

Note: This guide is directed toward beginner gardeners or those who want a refresher. If you're a more experienced gardener, I’ve included some of my favorite horticulture resources throughout.

Identifying How Much Shade Is in Your Chicago Yard

The first thing to do is assess how much shade each part of your yard gets. At the risk of stating the obvious: don’t assume you know. Many plant failures come from simply misreading the light. Nothing worse than believing your yard is shady all day… only to find out that while you are at work, a flash of harsh afternoon sun is burning holes through your begonias. (Not that I would know about that, oops!)

Instead of guessing, try this: stand in the same spot and take a photo at sunrise, 9am, noon, 3pm, 5pm and sundown to see exactly how sunlight moves through your space. Note that the time of year changes the placement of light as well.

Many areas of Chicago yards fall into these categories (which you'll see on the tags of shade-tolerant plants in North America):

Part Shade

Includes three different situations in the Northern U.S.:

Morning sun (2–5 hours of sun per day in spring, 3-6 in midsummer); midday shade
Morning shade, midday sun (2–5 hours of sun per day in spring, 3-6 in midsummer) — this may be called "part sun" because more light is supplied to plants
All-day filtered or "dappled light" through tree canopies or between fence posts; this can also be called "part sun"

Full Shade

Less than 2 hours of sun per day in spring (less than 3 in midsummer) is typical of courtyards, side yards, or spaces behind garages. Consider "deep shade" to be a unique situation — no direct sun and very little reflected light — even though it technically falls under “full shade” on plant tags.

A Note About Chicago Soil

While you’re checking sunlight, take note of your soil as well. It’s easy to assume Chicago’s soil is heavy clay. But in reality, much of the city has dark, nutritious silty clay loam — a mix of clay, silt, and sand. It's often compacted (hence, the assumption it's clay) by constant construction and foot traffic, but it drains better and is more workable than it appears.

What does this mean for you?

Your soil may hold moisture well, which is great for most plants — and means you can have a sustainable, low-water garden
You don’t need to amend the soil in most cases. An annual layer of organic mulch or compost is usually enough to relieve compaction and encourage long-term soil health

Best Plants for Chicago Shade

Choosing the right plant for the right space is always essential — especially in shade. That's why this list features plants I’ve seen thrive in a typical shady Chicago yard, organized by the role they play in a garden. Most are easy to find at local garden centers — or even home improvement stores if you’re keeping an eye on your budget.

In this plant list, I've opted to use common names — rather than specific binomials — to avoid an overwhelming amount of info and number of choices. Image-searching these common names may help you start to wrap your head around the plants, and even identify what you find appealing in your own neighborhood.

Sort of obvious but easy to forget: Before purchasing a plant, check the distributer's tag to reconfirm its light and water needs. If you're purchasing online, check if the plant can grow in your USDA Plant Hardiness Zone (Chicago area is 5b, 6a or 6b). Tags also list the plant size at maturity. Plants in shade are often slow-growing, so if you prefer a fuller look, search for its “growth rate” online — and for slow growers, consider thoughtfully overfilling the space.

One last thing: If you're interested in exploring native plant options (good on you!), I've written "**" by all plants that have varieties or cultivars native to North America.

A. Woody Plants

These structural plants add height over time to give your garden a backdrop — plus the evergreens provide year-round presence:

Boxwoods
Hollies**
Yews**
Euonymus**
Leucothoe**
Rhododendrons and azaleas**
Some hydrangeas**
Some viburnums**

B. Flowers + Foliage

Reliable perennials in full shade or partial shade:

Hostas (a.k.a., plantain lilies)
Heucheras** (a.k.a., coral bells)
Brunneras
Lilies of the valley

Perennials for areas with partial shade or part sun:

Anemones**
Hardy geraniums (a.k.a., cranesbills)**
Astilbes**
Some lilies
Some irises**

C. Native Plants for Shade

These perennials native to North America are particularly excellent for filling space in diverse shaded conditions. Just note that deep shade may mean fewer flowers, thinner leaves. If you can't find these plants at your preferred garden center, try Possibility Place Nursery — a native plant supplier south of Chicago.

Woodland phlox**
Short’s aster**
Solomon’s seal**
Jacob’s ladder**
Mist flower**
Foam flower**
Some goldenrods**
Some ferns**

E. Groundcover and Grasses

Great for replacing patchy lawns (perhaps with the help of some mulch) or filling super-tight dark areas:

Japanese spurges
Hakonechloas
Ajugas
Sweet woodruff
Wild ginger**
Some carex**

Want to dig deeper on these plants? Here are trustworthy horticulture resources for plant identification and information:

Royal Horticultural Society Plant Identifier
North American Native Plants: Ladybird Johnson Native Plants Database

Design Tips for Shady Chicago Gardens

Now that you know your yard’s soil and sun conditions, and have narrowed down your list of plants, here are some things we think about when pulling it all together. These aren’t hard-and-fast rules — I think of them as ways to construct a garden in manner that allows you to enjoy it both visually and physically.

Tip 1: Layer Heights to Create Focus and Depth

To create a classic layered look, start with shrubs closest to any tall architectural elements, such as a home, privacy fence or stand-alone garage. Often evergreen, shrubs can also serve to add year-round interest. In front of the hedge, create descending layers of height with mounding plants — these outward-growing plants bring seasonal color and texture. In front of or between groupings of mounding plants, use low-growing ground covers or mulch to break up space.

Using descending layers will give onlookers clearer visibility of all the plants in your garden and create an aesthetically pleasing composition. But there are many ways to thoughtfully break this mold. For example — for a less formal look, intersperse upright or arching plants in front to add vertical interest. Or for a more naturalistic woodland feel, place native understory plants throughout, many of which have a bushy, space-filling appearance.

Tip 2: Create a Unifying Theme or Style

No need to assume a generic approach is the easy option — fortunately, knowing what appeals to you personally can make your shade garden appear more cohesive. Are you looking for something modern? Easygoing? Do you want to embrace native plants, or prefer something exotic? Or does it just need to look tidy? Any of these approaches can help inform your shade garden so the design feels unified.

The key is to set a theme as a “north star” before you plan, and weigh your plant and design choices against it. Some successful themes I’ve seen may look something like this in the gardeners' mind: “native understory garden,” “prehistoric fern habitat,” or “bold, modern, and architectural.”

If this tip is tough to apply, see below for a few theme examples in our own work.

Tip 3: For Seasonal Color, Think Beyond Flowers

You probably already know the bad news — shady spots are notoriously bad for beloved blooms like roses, sunflowers, or lavender. But with a quick shift in perspective, you can rethink what “color” means in a garden. Shade-tolerant plants offer a variety of colors through foliage, stems, berries, and smaller or sparser flowers. For example, Heucheras alone have a foliage palette ranging from near-orange to green to purple — in tones that vary from bright to muted.

But where shade plants really excel is their shapes and textures. Think of the large veined leaves of Brunnera or the poetic, bowing spheres of Hakonechloa. So for best results, envision your artist's palette as containing more than color — include shape and texture as well.

Ideas for Urban Shade Gardens

Below are a couple of real projects that show how to make the most of limited light — from creating pops of color and texture to reimagining ground cover without a traditional lawn.

1. Colorful Front-Yard Shade Garden

This part-shade yard came with a few beautiful trees and a couple thriving hostas, and the homeowner had the classic request for “more color” plus hedges to complement the modern home. Midway through the project the city unexpectedly removed a street tree, pushing the space further into the sun — but most of the new plantings took the transition in stride.

We designed around the existing trees, building soft, descending layers. Oakleaf hydrangeas create the main hedge line, with variated leucothoe tucked in to help blend into the rest of the garden. That's where sweeping patches of astilbes, flowering heucheras, and hostas in deep green, chartreuse, and purple bring the color sought by the homeowner.

To add structure and an open walkway, we gave the garden a vertical and horizontal path, shaped like a plus, filled with organic mulch that echoes the wood cladding on the home.

Along the sunniest edge, bordering a hot sidewalk, we added spiky liatris and seasonal sun-loving annuals like pentas, which can be swapped out for seasonal hits of color. Given the addition of sun thanks to the city's tree trimming, we took a risk and added a few more pink liatris throughout. The result is a colorful garden with an effortless feel and an immediate sense of maturity that will only grow over time.

Tap any picture to see a larger view.

2. Shady, No-Grass Front Yard

Surrounded by very tall, established trees, this brand new home sits mostly in "dry shade” — full-shade plus branches and roots blocking moisture from the soil. After assessing the builder-installed plants, we reimagined the space with a more naturalistic structure, with moisture locked in by compost and mulch.

New layers came from a playful mix of shrubs: five-gallon boxwoods, Hydrangea ‘Ruby Slippers,’ Hydrangea ‘Mariesii,’ and bluestem grasses. A simple drip irrigation system balanced out the dryness without abandoning low-water goals, while seasonal planters keep the entry welcoming year-round.

In place of a lawn, Japanese spurge forms a carpet in organic wood mulch — which is an ideal ground covering here, since mulch emulates a woodland habitat. Although often assumed to be empty space, mulch is a visually dynamic ground cover when used between and around other landscape features — and with the right proportion of nearby plants, can sustainably replace conventional lawn that fails in shade.