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Not Your Grandma's Coleus!!

© Mary Henry

Modern coleus, whose botanical name has now been changed from Coleus blumei to the mouthful Solenostemon scutellarioides, is more robust, more varied, and most often grown from cuttings, not seeds, as it used to be. That, it turns out, was the reason for the original fall from grace and the secret to coleus' resurrection to favored status.

At the peak of the Victorian coleus craze, the production of the plant was improved by developing varieties that could be grown from seed. Seed-grown plants are always cheaper than cutting-grown ones, so the older varieties lost out. However, producing seed was the focus of these plants and they began to lose vigor as soon as the flowering began. When the seeds were all formed the life of the plant was essentially over. This is the coleus I knew as a child.

Some improvements in form and vigor in the seed-grown strains had been achieved again by breeders in the '70s and '80s, but you still had to pinch the heck out the plants to make it through the summer.

Meanwhile, a quiet underground of coleus lovers had been growing and passing along the best of the older Victorian varieties until the gardening world was ready for something new. In the last two decades breeders have also bred in related species from Asia and Africa to produce the new varieties that have taken the gardening world by storm. Today there are over 500 varieties of coleus in cultivation. The new breeding programs have produced nearly sterile plants that rarely, if ever, flower. Vigorous, healthy and adapted to full sun as well as shade, the modern coleus are everything I wanted and then some.

Now the trouble with coleus is you can't grow just one! You should grow them in drifts, as major accents in beds or even annual ground covers as well as in mixed containers and hanging baskets. There are upright, large-leaved, bold-colored plants that can reach up to four feet in height as well as diminutive, multi-colored, small-leaved mounds only just over a foot high, and gloriously colored trailers to billow over and spill out - something for everybody. This summer I had a mosaic of coleus varieties that covered roughly twenty square feet under a Norway maple. It was spectacular and only required watering because the summer was relatively dry and the maple greedy. It got nothing else except admiration. Look at some of the links at the bottom of the page to see the great variety of coleus for yourself.

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