Coleus: show me your best coleus design or container II, 1 by pirl

pirl wrote:
Getting older is far better than the alternative!

Now that I'm 71, Jack and I made the decision to eliminate one garden in total. My daughter and her husband cleared a huge area and they can have all the hydrangeas, Japanese and Siberian irises, daylilies galore, and hundreds of astilbe that are there. We never go to that garden except to work and (to quote a friend) "when it's not fun anymore" it's time to end it. We'll always have beautiful memories of the porch garden (photo #1) and we still have another 20+ gardens to enjoy.

The best thing we ever did was to use pine needle mulch. It cuts back so much on the weeding.

As for falling, I guess we've all had our tumbles. When I fell backwards I remember thinking as I fell, "This shouldn't be happening!". Thank God, no injuries, but it taught me to go a bit slower and watch where I'm going. Sounds so easy but with a huge bucket of branches to be chipped I can't always see exactly where my feet are heading.

Coleus are a blessing for us. We can take cuttings or not. We can save what we have or order again. We can save some and not others. The choice is ours.

In 1961 my brother, 6' tall, took a 6' fall from a ladder and only one nerve in his spine held on but it gave way on the tenth day and he died.