By Bodie V. Pennisi
Georgia Extension
Service

Spring and summer in Georgia are green and alive with color
outdoors, but they don’t last. Indoors, though, your garden can
brighten your days year-round with the durable wonders of foliage
plants.

Blending well with flowering potted plants, foliage plants make
wonderful gifts. They add a remarkable variety of leaf sizes,
shapes, textures and colors. Combined in dish gardens, small
foliage plants offer delightful displays as instant miniature
gardens.

So many species and cultivars of foliage plants are available
now. And new ones are introduced every year.

Foliage plant breeders have focused on improving plants’
appearance and performance indoors. Each year they select plants
for qualities such as repeat flowering, increased disease
resistance and tolerance to low light and temperatures. Some show
spectacular displays of leaf colors, too.

Some winners

Here are some of the exciting, new foliage plants to look for in
the garden center.

Aglaonema ‘Red Gold’
features green and yellow speckled leaves with very
characteristic and unusual pink petioles. As with all Chinese
evergreens, it can perform excellently indoors.

Anthurium ‘Tropic Fire’
features bright fiery-red spathe and white spadix. This new
cultivar produces a full pot of rich, medium green, shiny foliage.

Calathea ‘Silver Plate’
features silver-green, glossy foliage, and long-lasting lighter
pink flowers. One of the few flowering calatheas in culture.

Carludovica ‘Jungle Drums’
is a new plant species for the foliage trade. It’s stemless, with
rounded, fan-shaped, rich green leaves, usually cut in two parts.
They resemble corrugated palm leaves but are much softer. Panama
hats are traditionally made of a close relative of this plant.

Chlorophytum ‘Fire Flash’
has glossy-green, lance-head-shaped leaves with distinct,
parallel veins and a bright coral petiole. The coral veins and
petioles make a strong contrast with the leaves, while the small
flowers are white in a dense, cylindric panicle partly hidden in
the foliage. This plant is a close relative of the spider plant
(Chlorophytum comosum) but has much larger leaves.

Dracaena ‘Rikki’ has
foliage that produces graceful arcs of deep green, glossy leaves,
with highlighted yellow bands in the center running the length of
the leaf. It is a wonderful companion to all other dracaenas and
does a credit to this genus of old favorites.

Homalomena ‘Purple Sword’
has spectacularly colored dark green and silver-marked leaves
with contrasting dark purple on the undersides.

Polypodium ‘Green Wave’ has
distinctive upright, dark green fronds. This new tropical fern
grows as vigorously as a Boston fern.

Spathiphyllum ‘Hi Ho
Silver’ is a variant of “Ceres,” the European variety that
blooms with a symmetrical shape. The leaf veins are lighter,
compared to the rest of the lamina, giving the leaf a unique look
of a subtle white web on a green background. This beautiful new
cultivar resembles a gray-green Aglaonema.

Syngonium podophyllum
‘Neon’ has bright, new hot-pink foliage. This small plant
branches freely and is perfect in large assortments or dish
gardens.

(Bodie Pennisi is a Cooperative Extension horticulturist with
the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences.)