HEUCHERAS are neat, evergreen, hardy, perennial plants much admired for their astonishing range of foliage shapes, colours and patterns. Many also develop small, but pretty, flowers that line the vertical stems in summer.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, heucheras were noted for their flowers and were widely grown as commercial cut flowers. Then, as more and more varieties with attractive leaves were developed, heucheras rapidly became more popular as foliage plants.
Then interest swung back to varieties featuring both good flowers and good foliage, and now growers are again developing varieties whose main feature is their flowers.
Heucheras as foliage plants
Interest in heucheras as foliage plants began to grow after the discovery of the dark-leaved ‘Palace Purple’, which is still popular, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, in 1980, and the silver-patterned, green-leaved ‘Dale’s Strain’ in the wild in the Appalachian Mountains in North America at about the same time.
Now, the variety
