Coleus "Chocolate Mint"

Lovely foliage, David.

Gorgeous colour David and with a name like that good enought to eat !

Great one!

Such a beautiful colour! Love these ones, but have never grown them. This year I've got some seeds and hope to have the beauty you grow. :)

I'll always remember Coleus being the very first plant I grew from seed in Primary School, at c. age 6. I ended up covering every windowsill and ledge in the house with them - lol! Always thought of them as houseplants, and only in recent years re-discovered them, and found them very good as summer annual foliage colour,of course, especially in shady areas.One work colleague last year looked at some pics I took, and said, haughtily, "You mean to say you grow "Fish and Chip Shop" plants?" This made me smile, because, certainly, I do remember that Coleus did seem to be the preferred plant ornamentation in fish 'n' chip shops here in the late '60s and into the '70s, lol! Their equivalent of the "Money" plants and Bird's Nest ferns in oriental take-aways - more great plant-related memories! :-))

Good luck with your seeds, Uma - and enjoy!!! :-))

PS. I now edit a GOYpedia page called "Coleus". Go there to see many wonderful, colourful pics from around GOY :-)

Thanks, David! I've seen many beautiful plants there! :)

Lovely photo of a lovely plant, David! Just like you I used to fill up every possible space with these plants. In Spain I used to grow enormous plants in very small pots! One summer they got blown off a windowsill on the 5th floor! I had a wooden bar across the windowsill (outside) but it broke & the plants ended up in the street below! It was a Sunday afternoon in the summer & we had gone to have lunch with my parents-in-law. There was a big thunderstorm & the wind & rain combined to make them fall off. Nobody was hurt but I always imagine it must have been quite a sight - half a dozen, or more, Coleus floating down out of the sky!!! :-D LOL! Talk about raining cats & dogs!!!! LOL!

OMG, Balcony! It was, indeed, lucky that no-one got hit, and no wonder you have such clear memories of those plants. Yes, you can grow them very large in quite small pots. I quite like to see the little flowers, but I do pinch them out to get better foliage.

I have grown them for many years. They are so easy to grow yet so rewarding! I have a couple of plants growing from seed on my kitchen windowsill in the pots of Amaryllis. One is now quite big. I don't know where the seeds have come from but they must have fallen in the compost from the year before when I let some plants flower on the kitchen windowsill. I didn't think they set seed without insect intervention. They obviously do, though!

I like to see the lovely blue spikes of flowers, too!

Glad to see this, David - even if I got here a bit late! :-))

I'm just sorry it took me so long to get a pic up! But, as you can see, Spritz, we will have them indoors with us throughout the winter, too. Many Thanks, again! XXX