Coleus Garden

A variegated ginger, several coleus, and some hypoestes—more images on Facebook

I decided to plant a bunch of coleus in the shade garden I built last fall. The shade garden is on the west-y side of the house. It is shaded by our house, the neighbor’s house and the huge oak that attacks the house and will eventually have to come down. When that happens, the fence will still provide shade from that direction.

So Suna and I made a trek to Round Rock Gardens today to stock up on all the varieties of coleus the have in stock.

• Black Dragon (I think we got one of these to overwinter, too.)
• Festive Dance
• Oxblood
• Wizard Jade
• Wizard Scarlet

The wildflower bed is filling in nicely.

To that I added the plants we got to overwinter in the kitchen window. Sometime I want to build a greenhouse so we don’t have to keep replacing these wonderful shade-and-heat-tolerant plants.

Suna had the great idea to anchor the beds with some Ginger. The stripey leaves go well with the coleus, and all the colors complement.She also suggested planting the Hypoestes at the front of the beds. I chose the Rose Splash^TM Select variety with pink in the leaves because it’s was between the red and white in the coleus.

The shade garden also smells very good. Part of the bark mulch came from shredding our Yule tree.