Flower Trials 2022: Foliage

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- Here it is at CREC a lovely, lovely day.

We're looking at temperatures in upper 70s right now which is so much nicer than the last video when we were in the 95 zone.

But, one of the things we were gonna discuss today is some of these wonderful foliage plants that are in the program.

And I'm standing right in front of these caladiums.

They're four of them here in shade.

Three are from Classic Caladiums and the fourth one is from Proven Winners.

This Ballet Slippers has a really nice color combination going on in the foliage.

Crystal Moon a little more compact variety, also very good.

Lemon Blush.

I love Lemon Blush.

And finally, Snow Flurry which is a Heart to Heart Proven Winners selection.

So all of these are good and they really do well in the heat.

So in the past few weeks they've been prospering quite well.

And there's one caladium in sun that we're testing this year from Proven Winners.

This is the Heart to Heart series, Xplosion.

That's with an X, not an E-X.

And it's got this wonderful color combination and it's performing pretty well in sun.

Usually the caladiums do a little better in shade, but this one's doing just fine.

So one of the wonderful groups that we have in the program this year are these Cyperus or Papyrus, if you prefer.

And we've had several different forms of these plants over the years.

Here's Prince Tut which is a nice, compact, very showy, and wonderful blooming plant.

It has this height at about four feet which is really a nice size.

Used in containers and so forth.

Here's a new one.

This is Baby Moses and this is from Kientzler.

That's from Proven Winners, but this one is from Kientzler, North America.

A very different structural effect.

Another compact variety, but a really, really strong performer.

- All right.

And our third Cyperus is this Queen Tut variety.

It is very compact.

You can see it's only about three foot tall, but it really fills out this container well.

And I think this would make an excellent addition to a large container in the middle of the planter.

- And here's something very different.

This is a plant called Homalocladium and it's entered by Kientzler, but it's foliage.

It's just this really interesting structural array of tissue coming out of the center of the plant.

A wonderful idea for combinations.

So you could put this in with a lot of flowering material and there's your vertical structural piece.

A really nice combination plant or stand-alone plant is this Tradescantia, Purple Queen from Proven Winners.

And it started out mainly as foliage, but now it's starting to really ramp up on bloom.

So it's kind of a neat contrast between the light pink flower and the darker purple foliage.

But strong, durable plant, been through a number of storms.

Absolutely no issues with it whatsoever.

- All right.

So I wanted to highlight these rex begonias from Ball Ingenuity.

They're in the Jurassic Rex series.

And I did kind of touch on them in our first video this season, but these are such great foliage plants.

They would look great by themselves as you can see.

They would look awesome in a container with maybe some impatiens or SunPatiens or maybe a different kind of begonia.

And honestly, we have 12 here in the series and there's every color you could imagine.

Gray, gray and pink, gray and green, there's a really awesome purple one as well and a really great lightish pink one too.

And I'll take a little B-roll footage for you all.

So you can see the whole lineup coming in.

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- We also have two Juncus in the program this year.

This is a Blue Mohawk from Proven Winners which is a really nice upright form with that blue coloration to the foliage.

And this one over here, Curly Wurly is actually really neat.

And both of these are really wetland plants by nature.

So if you're putting these in containers, you wanna make sure you keep the moisture levels up.

Another great entry from Proven Winners is this Muehlenbeckia, Big Leaf.

And it does have a bigger leaf than most Muehlenbeckias I've seen before, but it's got this wonderful dark green foliage to it and it makes a wonderful spiller for container use.

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