Tender Plant, Tough Man

Do my coleus, enjoying an 80 degree October day, know they are actually sitting on death row?  The weather-people say cooler temperatures are imminent, and even if we have another non-winter here, it will soon be too cold for coleus.  A true tropical, the year-round residency of a tender coleus plant is confined to USDA Hardiness Zone 11, which is some pretty scarce real estate.  I could take some cuttings and try to keep them alive on a windowsill.  I am so enamored of their lovely leaves, perhaps I will.

 
With foliage in all of nature’s colors except true blue, and leaf shapes ranging from thin and lacey to flapping elephant-ears, coleus has a lot to offer the gardener who wants more than flowers.  I became a coleus-phile in the fourth grade.  Our teacher, Miss Perna, had a classroom full of them, and my buddy Allen and I volunteered for the tending.  This altruism wasn’t inspired by a love of plants, but rather our schoolboy crushes on our mentor.  When classes wound down in June, Miss Perna announced she was giving up teaching, getting married and moving to Cincinnati.  How could she?  Allen and I got to split up the coleus collection as a consolation prize.      
 
With a kaleidoscope of colors to choose from, every coleus can be your favorite.  This summer, I have a giant specimen with deepest purple leaves edged in green growing in my purple tire planter.  A large affair with pink, green and white leaves hides the propane tank

nicely.  Perhaps the most exotic one sports finely-cut foliage of gold and maroon.  Just a few years ago, plants in these loud regions of the color spectrum were considered crass and denigrated by garden experts, who decreed that only pink, blue, white and silver were to be used by the well-informed.  As a result, the popularity of coleus in the 80’s tanked.  Luckily, those conservative opinions have fallen away, and riotous, anything-goes color is now appreciated.  The cry of the coleus today is “let the good times grow!”
 
The happy coleus came about in part due to a rather difficult man.  Carl Ludwig Blume, a horticulturist of German extraction, was sent to Java from the Netherlands in 1819.  In addition to studying the blooms, Blume also was the “inspector of vaccinations” and was tasked with protecting folks from cholera, typhoid, and the like.  While plant collecting, he came across coleus, which was transported back to Europe and eventually became a hit in the gaudy gardens of the Victorians.  By some accounts at least, Blume was autocratic, dominant, and generally antagonistic to his peers and potential friends.  At least one historian today believes that Blume might have just been seeking to keep his employer, the Leiden Herbarium, number one in the uber-competitive world of nineteenth century botany.  In any case, Blume would be peeved if he found out that coleus, once named in his honor as Coleus Blumei, is nowadays called by the charmless binomial Plectranthus scutellaroides.