Friends have raved about this plant for years but this is the first summer I had it. Bought two, actually, and made them the centerpiece of a large dark gray planter on the patio that sits in a good bit of shade. My choices of companion plants were OK - there are some nasturtiums and climbing geranium and a few pink snapdragons - but live and learn, right? Next summer I'll definitely want more Stobilanthes dyerianus. It looked very dramatic against the gray of the planter and really brightened a shady part of the patio. Maybe I'll get smarter and luckier in finding companion plants in shades of silver, pink and blue-green.
Although you'll read that Persian shields do best in full sun, these had none of that and are quite large. I'm thinking how nice they'll look repotted and brought inside for the dining room window sill over the winter. The dining room has a lot of those colors - teal, purple, rose. Can you picture that?
I consider this one of the happier discoveries of the past summer, which was not the greatest in my garden. In fact, it was a complete disaster for tomatoes. Last year we had enough to share with the world. This year, I went begging.
I put the tomatoes in a different spot, to give the raised bed a rest, but it was the same exposure and (I thought) the same amount of sun. Perhaps it was the extreme heat and dryness, but the tomatoes never took off. I'm still getting cherries and other smaller varieties, but I've had only about a half-dozen good-sized ones.
That's been the worst thing about the summer, and while I've enjoyed good local tomatoes from farmer's markets, it's just not the same.
Wish I could take those tomato plants inside for the winter and coax them along, but there's no way they'd survive. The Persian shield, on the other hand, I'll enjoy till it's time to put it back outside in spring. Which at the moment seems a long way away ...
