Most of the plants I mentioned aren't evergreen, and they weren't meant to be prescriptive in any event. You should check out what your local nurseries have available, see what you like, and research their eventual shapes in a shrub book or on the internet. I'd say deciduous shrubs would be nicest in this setting, but your taste may dictate otherwise. I will add my mite too to the question of whether your conditions "qualify" certain plants to grow in the situation you are working with. What you need to understand in order to evaluate plants for this area is why various plants need the amount of sun or shade that is recommended for them, and what will happen if they don't get it. To some extent trial and error is the only way to learn this, but you can also learn the horticulatural principles to improve your ability to guess which plants will succeed. For example, most shade plants are adapted to catching as much light as possible in a shady environment. This is why many of them have big leaves. And they tend to prioritize surface area over leaf thickness, as they aren't faced with dessicating sun. So when you put shade plants in too much sun, the leaves are prone to burning and scorching, and they tend to wilt. Sun plants, on the other hand, have adaptations that allow them to resist heat, and they get leggy and don't bloom if they get too little sun. Obviously there are endless variations of leaf size and other attributes. For example, as someone mentioned above, there are hostas that actually want and need a certain amount of sun. And there are plants that are adapted to grow in the shade of deciduous trees, so they bloom in early spring when they get sun, and go through their leafy phase during summer. Some plants can also adapt to local conditions. For example, if the shade is really heavy and dense, as in the shade of a house, shade plants will grow their leaves extra big. But such a plant will be extra-sensitive if you change its conditions in mid-season or maybe if it gets a mid-day blast of sun. The conditions recommended on plant labels are only a guideline, and there are no guarantees that your conditions of partial shade are the kind of partial shade that a certain plant wants. KarinL

I must have been depressed for the past 43 years because I stand by my kitchen window with a cup of coffee and a piece of toast and wait for the first light. The window faces west so there is not a lot of drama. I wish I had your view, but I can see the sky. All is well.

The purple flowers at the top of the fence are from Clematis Etoile Violette, a viticella clem that is very easy to grow. It is a very dark purple which is set off well by the very pale pink of the New Dawn rose. The picture was taken June 14, 2007. The bluer purple flowers at the bottom in the shade created by the rose are Zwanenberg Blue Spiderwort (Tradescantia). I just realized that I didn't show you any of the hybrid daylilies that are in the niddle portions of the long narrow bed. Didn't want you to think that there are only the orange ditch daylilies (Hemerocallis fulva) that are shown in the 1st picture! The fulvas (spreading not clumping dls) are in the northwest corner in almost total shade due to the northern exposure and an overhead tree. These started blooming this year on June 10th. The dozen hybrid daylilies in this narrow bed are all new plants and eventually I'll have to move about half of them somewhere else when they grow too crowded. So don't be too concerned about overcrowding your bulbs - most all of us overcrowd something sometimes and then have to move things around. LOL I also wanted to mention that I tried to stagger the daylily bloom (mostly July bloom) in between the early June blooming Asiatic lilies & the late July blooming Orienpets, but tried to keep most things in the same red/yellow/cream color scheme because there is bound to be some overlap. The only exception was the New Dawn rose which is at the far south end near the fence - because that's the only space I have that is big enough. She can put out 20 foot long canes which I wrap around the corner walls on both sides. She has one main flush in early June and some scattered later bloom as does the clematis. The rebloom clashes a bit with the daylilies strong colors, but not enough to matter much. I am just mentioning all this to give you an idea of the progression that goes on in the bed through the season, even though it is a very narrow bed. I still have one cream-colored daylily , copper colored helenium, Orange Perfection phlox (not really orange in color) in bloom, along with some bronze-colored mums that are just starting & some rebloom on the spiderworts and clemmies. Oh, and I forgot to mention some blue berries on the Variegated Porcelain vine which is on the wall between two of the clems. Here are some of the daylilies. With various dls blooming at slightly different times, I get some nice punches of color over a period of about 6 weeks. Not boring waiting and watching for each to show its stuff. Francois Verhaert Larry Grace Royal Frosting Ruby Spider

All we had here was wind and rain and I doubt there is much damage, except it is likely some of the corn was blown over. I haven't walked down to the garden to look at it yet, but know from experience that wind in the 30s and 40s will blow down some of the corn and then it will straighten itself up without any help from me about 95% of the time. We have 1.25" in one rain gauge this morning and 1.5" in the other, and they sit about 100' from each other, but our mesonet station recorded 3.5" of rain and we had some flash flooding in the portions of our county where the heavier rain fell. Today looks to be another very windy day, and the risk of severe weather remains high for much of the state, so we'll see how our gardens look tomorrow I guess. The cloud cover generally is not an issue. First of all, the plants are still getting light--they just are getting less of it. The plants are fine and, if they are smart, they are enjoying the cool, cloudy days because once the summer heat sets in, they'll be sweltering in too much intense sunlight and heat. Has growth been perhaps a little slower this season? Of course. Remember that the plants had recurring very cold weather, including late frosts and freezes, through the first week in May. The colder soil and air temperatures can slow down growth. Most have had plentiful rainfall in May (except for the people in the panhandle, we all need to be praying they get some rainfall up there!) and, while rain is good, too much rain can clog the root systems and interfere somewhat in nutrient uptake. This manifests itself generally as slower growth and off-color foliage that can range from a yellowish-green to a purplish-green, depending on how lacking they are in nutrition because the roots are clogged. My plants are a little paler in color, too, than I like, but all we need is a sunny week to dry out the soil and they'll be fine. Soil improvement is important, but even in unimproved and unamended soil, most plants will produce surprisingly well. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work to improve your soil, because we all should and most of us do, but it does mean that you still can get a decent harvest even in the early years of your garden, long before you feel like the soil has arrived at the 'excellent' status you're striving for. Soil improvement never ends because "heat eats compost", so no matter how much organic matter you add to soil, the organic matter does break down really fast in our long, extremely hot summers so we always have to be adding more. Most of my soil improvement nowadays comes in the form of organic matter used as mulch. As the mulch decomposes it feeds the soil and the soil feeds the plants and I keep adding more mulch on top of the decomposing mulch and the process just repeats itself continually. Our soil was horrific when we moved here. You could make red clay pots from it. In some areas where we haven't done soil improvement, it still is that way as we discovered when the shifting of the clay in extreme to exceptional drought broke our water line twice in 2011 and once in 2012 and we repeatedly had to dig in that dense red clay (speckled with bits of gray clay) to repair the water line. In areas where we have gardened, the red clay is now a brownish sandy loam at least in the top 8 or 10" of the soil, then is slowly gets redder and clayier the deeper you dig. I try to double dig one long raised bed in the big garden every winter and amend the entire double dug area, and then that bed is where the main tomato planting goes. That means every major raised bed only gets double-dug about once every 7 or 8 years, but considering that the soil broke shovels and you couldn't dig it at all in the beginning, being able to double dig shows huge soil improvement over the years. Our soil pH tested just over 8 when we first moved here and our water tests at 8.2 to 8.3, but with many years of amending and with tons and tons of chopped and shredded autumn leaves and also finished leaf mold added as well, much of it now is in the 6.8 to 7.0 range, though irrigation works against me since I have to use such alkaline water. Our first few years here, I added every form of organic matter and other soil amendments I could get my hands on including various forms of compost, manure, lava sand, greensand, dry molasses, blood meal, bone meal, etc. Our place was just a fallow farm field when we bought it, though cattle had been run on it since the farming stopped a couple of decades earlier, and it was pretty depleted in terms of nutrients and organic matter.. After I started planting, I started encountering cotton root rot and it took several years of heavy amending to get that area improved enough that cotton root rot wasn't an issue any longer. Oddly, a band of deep sandy soil (perhaps an old silted-in creek bed or contour swale) runs along the western edge of the garden and, while sandy soil sounds wonderful, it was almost pure sand and silt with no clay and no organic matter so it drained so fast I couldn't keep anything alive, even with irrigation, in it during the summer months for our first few years here. Finally, by about 2004 we had amended it enough that plants could survive the summer in it. In some ways, fixing sand that drains much too quickly is harder than amending clay that won't drain at all. Because we have such a high soil pH and I need to do everything I reasonably can to lower it, leaf mulch is the ingredient I add every year though I also am constantly adding other materials throughout the year as mulch. Grass clippings alone put as much nitrogen into our soil as most plants need, and we have a virtually endless supply of them since we have to mow several acres. I tend to add grass clippings, old spoiled hay and straw and some home-made compost year-round as mulch, and add lots of chopped and shredded leaves in the fall, and leaf mold/composted autumn leaves in late winter before planting time. One thing I never have to worry about here is having anything turn my soil too acidic.(I wish!) With a high natural pH of the soil and water, it is a constant better just to keep it near the neutral range. It doesn't really matter what you add as long as you add 'stuff'. I use anything and everything I can get my hands on that qualifies as organic matter, but am very careful to always make sure all animal manures (cow, rabbit, chicken) are completely composted before adding them. We also use cover crops and grow some compost/green manure crops which are grown purely for use as compostable material. The biggest sign that our soil is reaching the desired state of tilth and texture? When we first moved here, we had a few earthworms but no snails and slugs. There were some sow bugs and pill bugs (they are decomposers and there wasn't much organic matter for them to decompose), but not excessive numbers. Over time, the earthworm population has skyrocketed, as has the sow bug and pill bug population----so much so that I have to work now to control them. If their population gets too large, they start climbing plants and eating tomato fruit, for example. About 3 or 4 years ago snails returned, in low numbers at first and now in much higher ones. As a gardener, you're never truly happy to see snails or slugs, but still, in our garden it was an important sign that the clay soil had become loamy clay soil with at least adequate organic matter. If you watch your soil and your plants, they will tell you when they are happy, as well as when they are not. Then, as the gardener, it is your job to figure out what needs to be 'fixed' in order to make the plants happier. Nine times out of ten, they are unhappy due to soil/nutrition conditions or moisture levels (too much is as bad as too little). Sometimes it is just air temperatures making them uncomfortably hot or cold and other times you may have pest issues. For all the pests that I see in my garden every year, I rarely have the kind of damage that requires I do something drastic to fight them. Generally I just do all I can to attract beneficial insects and then rely on the beneficial insects to kill the pest insects. One thing you learn as a gardener is that you cannot control everything, and you just have to go with the flow sometimes. Plants are amazingly resilient, and with all the challenges we face gardening here, that is a good thing. I don't think feeding plants with a water-soluble fertilizer will help if the issue is that your plants are waterlogged. You'd just be adding more water. Sometimes when waterlogging is causing foliage to be off-colored, you just have to be patient and wait for the soil to dry. Organic fertilizers like Espoma Garden Tone and Tomato Tone are wonderful but, unlike synthetic fertilizers, these are slow-acting (which is great for the plants) so you don't see a big, fast boost, which is fine. You just see the plants gradually get happier. I don't use many synthetic fertilizers except for plants in containers, where heavy watering leaches out nutrients continually, but there is nothing wrong with using them if that is your choice. One way I do like to use Miracle Grow is to boost flower production in summer once the temperatures are so high that they impede fruit production. What I do is watch the forecast carefully for a "cold front", which normally is accompanied by rain, and then about 3-5 days before it is expected, I feed my tomato plants and sweet pepper plants (and maybe the hot peppers, but only if it is so hot that they aren't setting fruit, which rarely occurs) with the MG Bloom Booster formula. It sort of primes them to be ready to bloom, and then during the cool spell or immediately after it, I'll usually get heavier blooming and some fruit set. This method works most years, but in 2011 it didn't, mostly because we never got that summer cold front that would drop temperatures back to a decent level. It is sunny here today and I am enjoying seeing the sunshine, but it likely won't last long. Just wait until July or August.....we'll likely be complaining then about the relentless sunlight and we'll be hoping for clouds!