As of 13 August 2026, AI can choose plants for your shady UK garden.

What to actually do

1. Do it yourself

   The route this page recommends

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open a free chatbot and take photographs of the bed from each side, including the nearby trees, walls and ground surface.
   2. Measure the bed's length and width, note its direction if known, and record whether the soil is dry, average or damp after ordinary weather.
   3. Paste the prompt and replace every bracketed slot with your measurements, observations, preferences and the names of existing plants.
   4. Answer the chatbot's follow-up questions using observations from the garden rather than guesses about soil type, drainage or shade.
   5. Ask for the final shortlist and planting layout, then compare every plant's light, soil, moisture, mature size and toxicity information with a current RHS or UK nursery plant profile.
   6. Remove plants that fail the site checks, confirm availability with a local nursery, and buy only the remaining plants in quantities that fit the measured bed.

   Prompt

   Act as a careful UK garden planting adviser. Help me choose plants for this shady garden bed.
   
   Location: [UK town or county]
   Bed dimensions: [length and width]
   Shade pattern: [deep shade, partial shade or dappled shade, and which hours receive direct sun]
   Direction the bed faces: [north, south, east, west or unknown]
   Soil: [clay, sandy, loamy, chalky or unknown]
   Soil moisture and drainage: [dry, average or damp; free-draining or waterlogged]
   Existing plants and trees: [list]
   Planting position: [under trees, beside a wall, exposed, sheltered or other]
   Preferred style and colours: [description]
   Maintenance I can manage: [low, medium or high]
   Wildlife or other priorities: [pollinators, evergreen cover, scent, cut flowers, pet safety or other]
   
   Give me a shortlist of 8 suitable plants that are commonly available in the UK. For each, state its preferred light, soil and moisture conditions, mature height and spread, flowering or interest season, maintenance needs, and one reason it fits this bed. Separate plants for the main planting from optional fillers or ground cover. Include spacing guidance as a rule of thumb, not an exact guarantee. Flag any plant that may be toxic to pets or children, invasive, unsuitable for a damp or dry site, or likely to outgrow the bed. Do not invent facts or pretend you can identify soil, drainage or light from a photograph. Where information is missing, ask up to 5 specific questions before finalising the list. Tell me which claims I should verify against a current UK nursery or RHS plant profile before buying.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Hand it to a person

   The distant third

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.