Annuals

• Partial shade-loving flowering plants growing on your porch will provide you with abundant bright, colorful, almost continuous blooming flowers throughout the growing season. Plant annual bedding plants rather than starting from seeds for best results. Favorite annuals for porches are impatiens, petunias, geraniums, fuchsias, begonias, dwarf salvia, coleus, and lobelia. Grow annuals in hanging baskets or floor planters or use them as filler plants for perennial and shrub containers.
  
  

Perennials

• You may not have considered growing flowering perennials on your porch, but many have a long blooming time of colorful and attractive flowers. Plant them with annuals, greenery or by themselves for easy porch decor year after year. Grow partial shade thriving perennials like bleeding hearts, coral bells, astilbe, clementine, chrysanthemum, coreopsis, hydrangea and aster for long lasting, easy care decor for your porch.
  
  

Herbs

• Flowering annuals and perennials are not the only plants you can grow in your porch hanging baskets and planters. There are several herbs that not only will give you interesting foliage textures and fragrance, but can be harvested and used for culinary purposes. Lemon balm, parsley varieties, thyme varieties, mints, shiso, and the very fragrant sweet woodruff all thrive in shaded environments and can add an inviting and pleasant aroma to your porch area, in addition to flavor to your cooking.
  
  

Shrubs

• Small shrubs in large containers grown on your porch brings your landscaping closer to home. Shrubbery in decorative planters are a classic statement and can be attractive almost year around with evergreen varieties or deciduous shrubs that produce colorful fall foliage and retain bright berries over winter. Shrubs like gardenia, dwarf azalea and hydrangea are colorful and fragrant, while heather, yews, dwarf holly and dwarf cranberry bushes will stay green all year with berries during the fall and winter.