I have some azaleas on the north side of the house. The azaleas are doing well so far, except for some deer nibbles. They get maybe 1-4 hours of sun (morning and evening) depending on the time of year.
The land is too sloped to mulch (15 degree slope), so all the mulch ended up at the bottom in two months.
Yet with nothing, it’s weedy hell.
The soil is acidic (pH 5.0), and it’s mostly shade as noted above. Is pachysandra basically my only option for a groundcover here? Everything else either doesn’t like the acid soil, or doesn’t like the shade.
Try the native partridgeberry. It’s a beautiful trailing subshrub with evergreen leaves, white flowers, and ornamental red berries. The batteries are edible, too, but don’t taste like much. You can grab cuttings from the woods and stick them in soil; most of them will root.
Wintergreen is another good option with similar overall attributes. It’s taller and the berries taste like, well, wintergreen.
Here’s some I have planted out front. I just put it in last year, so it hasn’t really filled in yet, but it should be most of the way by the end of summer.
I have seen it available for purchase on eBay and some other places. If there’s somewhere you can legally collect cuttings, it establishes super easily.
Funny. I just pulled out a book on groundcovers before I read your message. Here are some ideas from the Native Plants for a Woodland Floor chapter: crested iris, allegheny pachysandra, celandine poppy, partridgeberry, wintergreen, allegheny foamflower, american barrenwort, piggyback plant, green-and-gold, and heucheras. From the Acidic Soil chapter: twinflower, pipsissewa, goldthread, galax, bunchberry, bluets, cliffgreen, and oconee bells. Do not forget about ferns and moss. Disclaimer: I have no experience with any of the plants that I mentioned!
Periwinkle(Vinca). Grows very well in the shade, spreads, doesn’t mind acid soil. I can actually send you some starts. But it is better to do in fall, more chances to establishment. If winter is mild, it is continuing to grow in winter. Evergreen.
Same here! But for the hill and under the bushes it is the best I can imagine! I actually found a way to keep it in boundaries. You just need to give it regular haircut along the border, you want it to stop at. In any case, it is better than English Ivy - that one spreads even more aggressively and very difficult to pull.
My suggest is bunchberry as it is a tough plant. We had them growing native all around our cabin in central WI years ago and the soil there is a pH of 5.5.
Only concern about bunchberry is heat. Multiple sources tell me it’s dicey south of zone 6/hot summer areas. Our average highs are in the upper 80s in Jul/Aug and we average 25+ 90°F+ days a year.
Possibly wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens)? It’s attractive, acid-loving, and does well in shade. Don’t know how well it handles the heat, exactly, but if it’s not getting baked in the middle of the day, it might be able to do ok where you are.
From what I’ve seen (largely in the wild), it’s not as aggressive a ground cover as some of the other things people have mentioned, but it might work well in combination with other things.
