The next time you get in the car for a near home ride, play a little game. Count the number of homes that were built in your lifetime. It's pretty amazing, right?

Unless the house was built in the woods, one of the first acts the new owner takes is to plant a few trees. The number and size of the trees will vary with his budget, but that begins everyone's march into shade gardening.

There are two chief problems when one approaches shade gardening. The first is to determine the degree or amount of shade you will be working with. The other is moisture robbing surface roots.

Maples are perhaps the most widely planted yard tree and have probably created the worst surface roots. You can quickly add beeches and the elm family to the problem list. As my yard wanders further and further from my house I see problems with sycamores, ash and tulip poplars.

I see few problems with oaks, hickories, dogwoods and most evergreens. If you are at the new home part of the cycle you might want to think twice about the trees that come to your yard. Check out the ground under the trees growing in your neighborhood and/or visit a mature garden like Longwood.

If you are in a more mature spot you choices are more limited. It would be horticulturally acceptable to remove some of the worst offending surface roots, Do that by cutting them cleanly near the trunk and digging them out. That's a lot of work and probably not an option favored by many of us.

Covering them with extra dirt is not an option. Even a slight change will start instant decline and eventual death with most trees. In the rare instance where this doesn't happen, the tree will quickly fill the new soil with more problem roots.

When one considers the combined problems of shade and roots there are spots that are virtually impossible to find plants that will grow. In these cases I am about ready to resort to a light coat of mulch for weed control, aesthetics and to convince my mower that mowing over tree roots is a bad idea.

If you are mulching remember that this brings insects and other varments. These, with the added dampness that mulch brings, can damage tree trunks. Keep the mulch at least six inches away from the actual trunk.

All that said, let me add that if you are gardening in shade where you have a high canopy with lots of light, or an area where the shade shortens the exposure to direct sun, you have a wonderful place to play, sit and plant.

I close by recalling one of the last times I took dad to the doctor in Quarryville. I asked him to point out the houses that were here when he was a boy. He got to maybe ten. That's a lot of shade gardens developing and they are still building.