3 tips for growing Caladium

With its heart-shaped, tropical-looking leaves, it’s no wonder Caladium plants are such a big hit in the garden. These tips will help you make grow this stunning plant with ease in your yard.

With lush leaves veined with red, pink, white and green, Caladium adds a festive colourful rainforest ambience to your yard. They’re versatile too. Caladiums can be used to edge a path or encircle a birdbath and they mingle well with ferns, impatiens or other shade-loving plants. You can easily create a container that's made for the shade by combining caladiums with upright or trailing annuals that thrive in low light, such as coleus and fuchsias.

Caladium leaves come in different hues. Caladiums are often sold in small pots and already display a few leaves so you can check out the colour before you purchase. Consider these for your yard:

• 'Caladium' boasts white leaves edged in green. It works well in shady spots and mixes well with other plants.
• 'Freida Hempel' has large red leaves edged in green and ribbed in crimson. It offers a lot as an accent for your yard.
• 'Miss Muffet' is a dwarf whose creamy white leaves are dotted with rose and edged in apple green.
• 'Rosalie', with carmine leaves edged in dull green, is another option for brightening up your yard.

These South American plants cannot survive conditions much below room temperature, and thrive in warm, humid conditions. They need a head start indoors. These tips will help you provide proper care:

• Smaller caladiums with elongated leaves are the best choice for containers.
• You can buy small plants at the garden centre or dormant tubers and start them in a warm indoor room. Plant the tubers, with the bumpy sides up, five centimetres deep in sterile soilless planting mix. Keep the containers at a warm room temperature and the planting mix constantly moist.
• Plant caladiums outdoors, spacing them 20 to 30 centimetres apart, when night temperatures warm to 16°C.
• In summer, water as needed to keep the soil moist and fertilize the plants every two to three weeks with a balanced soluble fertilizer, applied according to package directions.
• If the leaves develop holes and slimy trails, suspect slugs or snails. Control these night-feeding mollusks by setting out saucers of beer to lure and drown the pests.
• If the foliage is pale and stippled, sap-sucking spider mites may be feeding on leaf undersides. Rinse them off with the hose or apply insecticidal soap per label directions.
• To save them over winter, you need to stop watering a month before the first frost, so that the soil and tubers dry. Lift dry tubers before frost hits the plants. Remove leaves and air-dry the tubers for a few days.
• Store them through winter in a box or paper bag filled with dry peat moss kept at a temperature above 21°C. Check monthly; if the tubers are beginning to shrivel, mist them with tepid water.
• Where summers are long and warm enough for Caladiums to develop large tubers, you can divide clumps in early spring and replant.
• It’s worth noting that in most regions of Canada Caladiums lose vigour each year despite care, making them unsuitable to propagate.

Caladiums need special care to thrive in the Canadian climate but all the work is worth having these vibrant, cheerful plants in your yard. These tips will help you successfully make Caladiuams a feature in your yard.