I’m not gonna lie, Hint of Lime Tostitos are one of my favorites.  Especially paired with a mango salsa.  I also love adding a hint of lime to my Diet Coke.

But today I want to talk about a different kind of lime, a vibrant pop of chartreuse foliage in the garden.  It’s a great way to brighten up a shady area, as well as a good way to add interest to a perennial border that doesn’t have much blooming currently (like mine).

One of my favorite perennials with bright lime green foliage is ‘Gold Heart’ Dicentra spectabilis, or bleeding heart.

That photo is a couple of years old, bleeding heart blooms in the spring so mine is not currently blooming.  But I actually grow this one for the foliage rather than the flower, isn’t it fabulous?

Lamium, or dead nettles (which is an awful name and that’s why I never call it that), is one of my favorite lime green ground covers.  It’s practically evergreen, even here in Minnesota.  It pops up in the spring looking green as the snow is melting all around it.

There are many different varieties of lamium with varying leaf colors including some pretty white and/or silver versions like the Pink Pewter or the Sterling Silver.  There are also a few varieties that I really don’t like at all, like the one called Yellow Archangel.

I don’t know the precise variety of the one shown above because it was a hand-me-down from a fellow gardener, however, I do also have a patch of the Lemon Frost variety in one spot that I purchased at a garden center.

It leans just a bit more towards lemon rather than lime.

One characteristic common to pretty much all of the plants that I’m mentioning in this post is that the more sun they get, the yellower and brighter their foliage.

Golden Creeping Jenny, Lysimachia nummularia ‘Aurea’, is a good example of that.  I took this next photo at the St. Anthony Park garden tour a couple of weeks ago.  The creeping jenny in the lower left of the frame gets quite a bit of sun.

My creeping jenny is in full shade, one of the shadiest areas of my shade garden in fact, and I wouldn’t even call it lime green at this point.

So that’s something to keep in mind with all of the plants I’m sharing today.

I do have a couple of shrubs that fit into my ‘hint of lime’ category.  The first is a Morden Golden Glow Elderberry.

Laura of Garden Answer recommended elderberry as a good substitute for Japanese maples.  They have a very similar leaf structure, but are much hardier in cold climates like my zone 4b garden (they are hardy in zones 3 to 9).  The photo above was taken when I first brought the plant home from the garden center.

I ended up planting it in a fairly shady spot, and the color is definitely less yellow or more lime now.

The second shrub on my list is the ‘Tiger Eyes’ sumac.  Unfortunately, my 8′ Tiger Eyes died back to the ground last winter.  If you plant one of these in our area, you’ll find that it is one of the last plants to break dormancy.  Every spring I wonder if mine is dead, and then it eventually sprouts new leaves.  But not this year.  So we cut it back to the ground.

But I’m happy to report that it has sent up some big new shoots, so all is not lost.

A big bonus to this one is that the leaves turn a vibrant orange to red in autumn, it’s fantastic for fall color.

Unlike most of the plants I’ve mentioned, the sumac is not a shade loving plant.  Mine gets a bit of shade from the carriage house and thus has always shot out nearly perpendicular to reach the sun.

There are lots of fabulous annuals with lime green foliage too.  Last year I had Wasabi coleus and Lemon Coral sedum (far right) in my front window box.

Lime green paired with deep purple foliage is always a great combo, like this sweet potato vine paired with a dark purple Oxalis.

I’ve left the most obvious example of lime green foliage plants for last, hostas!  You know I love ’em.  And there are lots and lots of options for lime green in hostas.

One of my favorites is the ‘Sun Power’ hosta.

This one positively glows in the garden.

I have a smaller solid lime colored hosta in multiple spots in my garden.  Once again, this was a hand-me-down plant, probably from my friend Sue, so I don’t know the name of it.

But over the years, many divisions have given me about 20 of them scattered throughout my shade gardens.  They create the perfect background for the spotted Pulmonaria ‘Raspberry Splash’.

Of course, there are also many, many options for variegated hostas that can add a hint of lime to your garden.  Sunset Grooves is a smaller one that has a lovely pop of chartreuse in the middle of each leaf.

Of course, the latest hint of lime I’ve added to my garden is an  Aralia cordata ‘Sun King‘.  After seeing so many of them at the garden tour I attended a couple of weeks ago, I had to get one for myself.

It’s small right now, but I’m hoping it will grow to fill in that space entirely.  I’ll be sure to keep you all posted on how that works out.

In the meantime, my sister and I are headed out to another garden tour today, this time put on by the South Saint Paul Garden Club (thank you Jayne for the heads up on this one).  One of the gardens featured belongs to my old friend Jackie, I toured her garden for you guys here on the blog back in 2018 (you can see those posts here and here).  So I’m really looking forward to getting another tour of her garden and others today!

So tell me, what’s your favorite plant for adding a hint of lime to the garden.  Leave a comment and let me know!