This year between the San Antonio Missions and the Great Train Adventure we have not spent a lot of time in gardens with coleus.
Here at the Cheekwood Botanical I found a few and even identified these varieties as Coleus Henna and Coleus Big Red.
The plain yellow and the fluffy red I did not find the label. Again there are just so many varieties I am surprised that the botanist can keep them straight.
Coleus is such a popular general decorating plant I find them in a lot of places like here at the Chattanooga Choo Choo in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
I was almost half way through the year before catching my first coleus addition from the Inniswood Garden in Westerville, Ohio. Unfortunately I have finished up the year and do not find that I captured any more this year. I know I have a lot more coming in later years.
My coleus collection was getting off to a slow start again in 2009 with only this lonely yellow and red specimen I found at the Yew Dell Gardens while we were staying in Louisville in August. Finally at the Missouri Botanical Garden I found a very good collection to observe. Very likely some may be duplicates of previous captures but coleus can show such subtitle differences I'm not sure when they become different.
It is rather obvious that these are different varieties both from the color and also slight differences in the shape and edges of the leaves.
This series is a lot more difficult to determine if they are actually different varieties or just variations on the same plant. Some of these appear to have variations even on the same stem which is radically different from the normal
perfect symmimetry of both color and shape.
Here is another exercise left for the reader. Are these three pictures showing two or three different varieties? I think the middle picture shows two variations on the same plant although they were packed so close together I am not sure where one plant ends and the next begins.
So to avoid straining eyeballs any further here are some more definitely different varieties of this really cool wonderful plant species.
While coleus is liked best for the variegated foliage they do flower as shown here. Somewhat like hosta the flowers can actually detract from the colorful display of the leaves.
I like camellias and roses are rather OK, but the coleus from the smallest sprout to a rather large bush maintain their beauty for as long as you can keep them from freezing.
Even within what are the same variety there are subtile variations in the coloring from one plant to the next.
This is also a rather unusual variation in that coleus is normally perfectly symmetrical. While the two opposing leaves are different the variation seems to carry from one leaf pair to the next to form.
These two rather plain selections are from the Noelridge Park in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Later I'll be adding a lot more from the DeMoines Botanical Garden.
Coleus is my favorite plant and although they do flower they are prized for the colorful variegated foliage. As part of our travels I have made it a habit to capture as many varieties as I can and I'll summarize the collection here although they may also appear on some other pages. These are from the Frederik Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan