Just thought I’d share with you this simple foliage combination from our garden here in Pennsylvania (click to enlarge).

I took out three aged, closely planted, flowering cherry trees earlier this year, and this opened up some new areas for planting. The new bed is mainly planted with annuals this first season, from seed and from cuttings, and the element that’s worked especially well is this combination of kale and coleus.

Curly green kale with its and heavily crinkled leaves, sits alongside this bright yellow coleus with red stems, the color seeping to the base of the foliage. Plus alongside, though growing much less strongly, there’s one of the those dramatically marked geraniums.

Names? Ah… Well the geranium is ‘Mr Henry Cox’. The coleus came unlabelled from a local nursery but it looks a lot like ‘Pineapple Queen’, although less pineapple and more yellow, perhaps. The kale? Same - unlabelled from a local nursery and of the three plants we bought, the two here are bushier and a little more blue than the other. Poorly rogued heirloom ‘Dwarf Blue Scotch Curled’, I suspect.

But it just shows, as in my All-in-One Garden book, that ornamentals and food plants can look great together. But we’re just going to wait a little longer before cooking some kale.