“Shady yard” gets treated as a single condition on plant tags, but a yard can hold three or four genuinely different kinds of shade within twenty feet.
Dappled shade under a mature tree canopy, deep shade against a north-facing wall, and moving partial shade cast by a structure are three different growing environments that happen to share a label.
The useful exercise, and it costs nothing but a morning, is tracking actual sun hours in each zone across a full day rather than guessing from a single glance.
The same logic applies to hardscaping decisions, not just plants.
Reading the yard this way turns “shady yard” from a limitation into a set of specific, plannable zones.