Tropical Drama : Coleus and Caladiums Provide a Jolt of Garden Color
TIRED OF IMPATIENS? Try coleus and caladiums.
Where summers are warm, these two plants--grown for colorful foliage, not flowers--thrive in the shade. At Villa Abondanza, a private estate in the Hollywood Hills, these two tropical-looking plants fill the beds with luxuriant, even exuberant, color all season long.
Villa Abondanza’s formal beds are part of the estate’s original 1920s landscape design. They line both sides of a cascade and pool that was inspired by the water chain of Villa Lante at Bagnaia (considered by many to be the finest of the Renaissance Italian villas). They were restored and replanted in this lush fashion by landscape designers Patrick Turnbull and Collie Valadez.
Several years ago, after the designers became bored with impatiens, they discovered that caladiums and coleus grow in the same amount of shade as do impatiens. Every spring, the two replant the beds as though these perennial plants were annuals. There is no attempt to keep the coleus and caladiums year-round, which is possible with impatiens. Furthermore, caladiums shrivel with the first frost, though they can come back from their underground tubers with the return of warm weather.
Turnbull and Valadez are quick to point out that Villa Abondanza has a warm garden with a southern exposure and that the pittosporum trees above the coleus and caladiums are trimmed high (the lowest branches are 7 feet up), so that their shade is neither dark nor dreary. The designers report similar success in a Brentwood garden and at their own home in Monrovia. They suspect, however, that where ocean breezes are more constant, and at the bottom of Coldwater and other cool canyons, coleus and caladiums might not find enough of the warm days and evenings they so obviously enjoy. In such locations, try them in sun or where walls protect them from ocean breezes. Because coleus are poisonous, the plants are not suitable for gardens visited by small children.
Pampered as they are by Turnbull and Valadez, the standard coleus planted in the centers of these beds grow as tall as 4 1/2 feet by summer’s end. Around them are caladiums, and along the edges of the beds are lower, spreading kinds of coleus.
The designers plant the coleus in spring, as the season’s flowers fade and provide space in the beds. The caladiums are planted a little later, just before the coleus grow together and touch. “The caladiums won’t grow until the soil is almost hot,” Turnbull says, “so we may buy the tubers earlier, but we don’t plant them until May or June.” Caladium tubers, which produce 18- to 20-inch plants, are available from January through May; the small potted plants that sometimes show up at nurseries don’t grow as well or as tall.
Turnbull and Valadez use the all-green or all-red coleus but tend not to mix them. “Some coleus colors can really clash,” Valadez says, “so we are careful to pick only those that go together. Too much variety makes the eye very nervous.” Adds Turnbull: “They can look terrible, like colored popcorn.”
The designers, who handpick every plant, buy coleus as small as they can find them, in color packs or quart pots, because an important part of coleus culture is pinching--every week the growing tips of the plants must be nipped to encourage bushiness; left alone, the plants tend to become tall and leggy. When the standard varieties in the centers of the beds are between 16 and 18 inches tall, they are tied to stakes so that overhead watering will not flatten them.
And they are fed, and fed, and fed. First at planting time, when the soil is heavily amended with organic matter (Turnbull and Valadez use a 2-cubic-foot bag of planting--not potting--mix for every 100 square feet), a pre-plant fertilizer (one with numbers on the label such as 2-10-10 or 2-12-8) and a peppering of the slow-release fertilizer Osmocote. All of this is mixed into the soil. Then the plants are fertilized every week with a liquid fertilizer used at half-strength. “We feed them to the point of almost burning the foliage,” Valadez says. “They are very hungry plants.” The beds are also protected with snail bait because snails love coleus.
All flower buds on the coleus are pinched off until about two weeks before Thanksgiving. By holiday time, the plants are covered with pretty blue flowers. Once the plants flower, they are finished and the leaves begin to drop. Even the flowers look good for only a week, but by then it’s time to plant the spring garden, and out they go.
Though this combination of coleus and caladiums lasts only through summer and fall, and must be replanted every spring, Turnbull will testify that “it’s worth the extra effort because it is such high drama”--something that would be too much to ask of the trusty but commonplace impatiens.
