Southern Gardening

Many people feel that the only way to get abundant color in your garden is to grow a lot of flowers. Today on Southern Gardening, we’ll look at some eye-popping color produced without a single flower. If you want BIG plants, there are several options. Banana plants come in different sizes and colors, from bright greens to red stripes. Some varieties are cold tolerant and will survive our Mississippi winters. Stepping down in size are elephant ears. Of course, everyone is familiar with the big green-leaved varieties, but there’s a lot more.

A spring time trip to your local garden center can easily provide sensory overload. “Wow! Look at this” or “Holy Cow! Look at that!” If you don’t go plant shopping with a plan, it’s easy to buy a lot more than you need. For example, let’s say you need to cover a large patch of ground. It’s hard to beat sweet potato vine for sunny ground cover. It’s a prolific grower, and covers a lot of space. It comes in bright greens, dark reds, and even variegated colors. What if you want a lot of trailing color. In that case, supertunias are fantastic. Only two plants almost covered this entire wall.

The object of most any flower garden is to dazzle with a lot of color, and one of my favorites for providing that color is rudbeckia. Rudbeckia are all round flowers with a center cone. But that’s where the similarity ends, since they come in different heights, different sized flowers, and even differ colors. One of the earliest blooming rudbeckia is Early Bird Gold. This is a showy perennial featuring bright golden petals with a dark brown center cone. Early Bird Gold is fast growing, produces loads of 2-inch flowers, and will reach up to two feet tall.

With Mother's Day coming up, consider putting together a beautiful combination container to brighten up a shady corner on her porch or patio. Not all plants will perform well when placed in a shady corner, so let's look at some plants that will be perfect for Mom's present. For this container, I’m looking for plants that like shade and partial shade. There are plenty of plants with colorful and interesting foliage. For example, Kong coleus is perfect with its large colorful leaves that feature incredible patterns. Another plant with striking foliage is Charmed Wine oxalis.