Whether sunlight bathes your yard or your trees create full shade, there's a creeping phlox for you.
Sun-loving creeping phlox, with mounds of 5-petaled spring flowers covering low mats of needle-like foliage, is a familiar sight in Midwest yards. Also known as moss pink, it's often seen punctuating retaining walls, edging garden paths or making a bright splash of mid-spring color in the rock garden.
Blooming in blue, pink, reddish-purple, or white, creeping phlox is always a welcome sign of spring. Mowing or shearing the plants as soon as blooms fade is usually all it takes to keep the moss-like, evergreen foliage handsome year round.
Although tolerant of poor soil and drought, this familiar creeping phlox (P. subulata) requires well-drained soil. And the plants won't survive long unless they're planted in full sun.
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An obscure cousin, on the other hand, grows best in full or partial shade. Called broadleaf creeping phlox (P. stolonifera), it blankets the ground with an attractive low mat of evergreen leaves that are broad rather than needle-like. For reasons I've never understood, this phlox is not nearly as well known as its sun-loving relative. But just try planting it beneath your shade trees, and I'm sure you'll agree it's just as lovely.
The dark-green, oval-shaped leaves are about an inch long. In April or May, trumpet-shaped flowers rise above the foliage, blooming in light or dark blue, pink, violet, or white. Popular varieties of shade-loving phlox include Blue Ridge, Bruce's White, Home Fires (clear pink, darkening to magenta-rose), Pink Ridge, and Sherwood Purple.
I like to plant broadleaf creeping phlox where it can weave in and out between plantings of coral bells, ferns, hostas, lungworts and other shade-loving plants. Although this shade-loving phlox spreads by creeping stems, I've never found it to be aggressive enough to threaten its neighbors. If plants start to go where you don't want them, you can simply snip off any unwanted stems.
Much less tolerant of drought than its sun-loving cousin, broadleaf creeping phlox grows best in rich, moist soil.
As with the sun-loving phlox, the plants will look neater if sheared after the flowers fade.
If the plants of either kind of creeping phlox become crowded and the blooms grow sparse, it's a signal that it's time to dig and divide the plants.
With the sun-loving type, that usually happens every three or four years. The shade-loving phlox, in my experience, needs dividing much less often. When dividing becomes necessary for either type, the best time for the job is right after their spring flowers fade.
