joene's garden » coleus

Plants on a frosty morning

joenesgarden — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 13:30:14 +0000

Awakening early on the first frosty morning of autumn is a photographic opportunity not to be missed. October 13, 2012 brought not just the first frost to my Connecticut gardens, but the first freeze. Temperatures dropping to 28 degrees F. ceases the growing season for tender annuals. The secret is enabling the camera lens to catch frosted leaves before they begin to thaw.

Coleus hates cold, but frost crystals add new depth to the maroon leaves of this variety. The moment the sun began to warm these leaves, they turned mushy brown.

Other garden plants are a bit more hardy. They usually bounce back from the first frost as if nothing hit them. Still, a coating of frost gives many leaves a whole new look.

Fern fronds appear to have been sprinkled with sugar.

Tiny leaves of ordinary thyme take on a variegated look.

Though temporarily weighted down by a coating of frost, these mums bounced back with new vigor.

Frost highlights the intricate patterns of foxglove foliage.

The grass blades crunched under each footstep. (I don't recommend walking on frozen grass unless you don't mind damaging it.)

Look at your landscape from a new perspective. You are likely to walk away with renewed appreciation for common scenery.

This bunch of grass grows next to an old tree stump piled with fieldstone while awaiting removal. It's an eyesore from any other vantage point, but not from ground-level with the sunrise glowing in the background sheds new light on the ripened seed heads.

Early morning observations, such as these, allow you to identify the areas of your landscape most susceptible to frost and give you insight into how frost settles. This can be valuable knowledge when trying to find the right place for new plant purchases. Placing a more tender specimen in an open spot may doom it to failure yet the same plant, in a more protected location, is likely to thrive.

One of the many pleasures of gardening comes from watching and learning about your landscape. An early frosty morning is another opportunity to learn … even without camera in hand.

Categories: Gardening, General, Seasons.
Tags: coleus, fern, foxglove, frost, gardening in Connecticut, mums, thyme.

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Coleus for Connecticut Gardens: You Can Grow That!

joenesgarden — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:42:55 +0000

Coleus for Connecticut Gardens: You Can Grow That!

If you have yet to discover coleus or think this warmth-loving annual is too tender for Connecticut gardens, it's time for your pleasant awakening. Coleus is easy to grow that provides constant color through its phenomenal range leaf hues and patterns. It makes a wonderful houseplant, an impressive container plant, and will fill spots in garden beds with splashes of season-long color. Coleus is my feature plant for this month's You Can Grow That!, a gardening is good for people blog meme begun by C.L. Fornari at Whole Life Gardening.

Coleus likes moist, but not soggy, well drained soil. It's Latin name, Solenostemon scutellarioides, is a mouthful. Coleus originated from warmer areas of the globe and is commonly hybridized, so now there are varieties that thrive in partial shade and full sun. Coleus have such diverse leaf patterns and shades that there's bound to be one that fits in your garden.

I can't recall when I fell for coleus … it was long ago … but this tropical annual has been part of my life for decades.

My windowsills house small coleus plants during cold months and water-filled vases of coleus cuttings in late summer. Once you buy one variety you like, it could be with you many seasons. These are from cuttings taken last summer. Now growing under florescent lights, they will be some of my outdoor container and garden plants this summer. To increase the diversity of the colors available to me each year I also start coleus from seed. Many catalogues sell coleus seeds in a mixture of color and leaf patterns, often Rainbow Mix. Pinetree Garden Seeds sells individual seed packets with enticing names like Chocolate Mint and Dark Chocolate, Black Dragon, or Palisandra, all with leaves in shades of burgundy and no green. There's coleus in shades of lime-green such as Limelight, and Pineapple (above), with lemon-lime leaves. Gardeners looking for shades of bronze to peachy orange can choose Sunset, the variety in the foreground of the photo to the left.

Coleus do not like cold. They are the saddest looking plants when touched with even a hint of frost so be sure to keep them in a protected area until all risk of frost is gone. Coleus cuttings root easily in water. About mid-summer, when coleus are beginning to get a bit leggy, cut off the top few inches of growth to just above a lower set of leaves. This forces lower leaf growth and gives you plenty of cuttings to root in water. Once rooted, plant the cuttings in soil to grow indoors during winter. In late winter, take fresh cuttings of these houseplants to root and plant in small pots to become outdoor plants when warm weather returns.

Aphids can be a problem on coleus plants but are easily washed off. A steady stream of water to the undersides of the leaves, where aphids like to hide, usually does the trick. Make sure any cuttings you bring inside are aphid free. And be sure to keep coleus out the reach of deer … they love to munch on juicy coleus leaves.

Coleus flowers, shown at the right, are tiny and purple. Once coleus to go flower their energy goes from leaf production to seed production, so the plants get tall and lanky. To maintain bushy growth, flower buds, such as the one growing out of the coleus in the foreground photo above, should be pinched off. If you do let some of your coleus go to flower, as I do at the end of summer when Connecticut's season for tender annuals is nearing and end, you'll find that pollinating insects love the blossoms.

With such ease of growth and diverse color choices you'll find coleus work in many combinations and situations. Here's a few ideas:

In 2011, Elizabeth Park, a Hartford treasure, featured coleus an annual bed. This photo is from early June. By July, as I'm sure the plants filled in and turned this bed into an explosion of color.

With so much to offer you may find it's hard to choose just one coleus variety. What makes growing coleus even more fun is that new color and leaf forms appear in garden centers every year. After all my years of growing coleus, I still can't choose my all time favorite.

Garden thoughtfully, and remember …

Please visit Whole Life Gardening to check out other You Can Grow That! ideas.

Categories: Gardening, Perennials & Annuals, You Can Grow That!.
Tags: coleus, Elizabeth Park, gardening in Connecticut, You Can Grow That!.

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A bad combination-A Gardening Oops

joenesgarden — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 11:28:41 +0000

A bad combination-A Gardening Oops

Garden bloggers love to share pleasing photos of beds or containers they've created or seen and wax poetic on the attributes of this plant or that. Gardens are supposed to be beautiful … well, duh … so why wouldn't bloggers flock to their computers to post their best, most spectacular photos and plant wisdom?

But, in real life, gardens are not always beautiful. Sometimes things just don't work. A plant is in the wrong place, the season is too wet or too dry for a plant to thrive, or plant-eating creatures/plant-attacking pathogens take over.

To deal with these real-life gardening issues there's GOOPs Day. GOOPs is the acronym I created for Gardening Oops. I've declared the first day of each month GOOPs Day … the day I share one of the gardening blunders I've made in my 30+ years of tending Connecticut gardens and the day I offer you the chance to do the same.

I come to my October 2011 GOOPs after missing, thanks to hurricane/tropical storm Irene's power outage, the chance to post a September 2011 GOOPs. Irene's life and land damage was enough of a regional and local mess that I need not go there. So, back at it this month, I present a plant combination from one of my gardens that caused me wonder what I was thinking!

I love coleus. I grow them in pots on windowsills during cold months. I start new coleus from seeds each spring. I grow them in outdoor containers and use their seemingly endless foliage and color variations for interest when garden flowers are taking a rest.

I'm always on the outlook for new coleus and this spring 'Saturn' coleus (Solenostemon scutellarioides) caught my eye. When I purchased Saturn the yellow-green mid-leaf color was more pronounced than that depicted on the plant tag. But it was early, Saturn had been growing in a greenhouse in partial shade so, I reasoned, its darker red coloration more similar to the plant tag had not had a chance to fill in as it might have if grown in full sun.

I brought Saturn home to plant along the outer edge of a morning-sun bed dominated by two hydrangea, a variegated lace cap and a classic blue Endless Summer. The bed also contains ivy ground cover punctuated by what ever dark-reddish heuchera decides to survive. I thought Saturn's dark-red-tinged-with-a bit-of-yellow-green foliage might complement the heuchera and ivy without distracting from the hydrangea.

Well, plants don't always turn out to look like the lovely photo on the plant tag.

My Saturn's foliage never developed more burgundy. It continued on its mostly yellow-green leaved path. It never bushed out in response to pinching back, as other coleus do.

It grew lankier than I expected and, at the same time, the lace cap hydrangea grew more bushy and wider.

The blue-green-edged-in-white variegation of the hydrangea foliage and the yellow-green-edged-in-burgundy variegation of the coleus foliage became a visual cacophony that makes me cringe!

The best thing I can say about this combination is that it's provided me with GOOPs fodder.

I still like Saturn … it still has a chance in my gardens. I've taken Saturn cuttings to see how its foliage acts when grown in pots with indoor light but, if it survives the winter without coming down with aphids, I'll find a more complementary spot for Saturn to thrive.

Now it's your turn to share a gardening faux pas. Leave your GOOPs in a comment below or share a comment and a link back to your own GOOPs Day blog post. Here's hoping my GOOPs prevent similar GOOPs in your gardens.

Garden thoughtfully …

Categories: Gardening, GOOPs-Gardening Oops, Perennials & Annuals.
Tags: coleus, coleus 'Saturn', Gardening blunders, gardening oops - GOOPs, hydrangea.

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