Candlestick Plant

Family = Lamiaceae
Genus = Plectranthus
Species = P. ciliatus

(Text taken directly from the plant ID tag, Mastertag)

Features:
- Attractive, large foliage with cream-white edges makes a nice companion plant.
- Upright habit mixes well with spreading and trailing varieties.

Design Tips:
- Create personalized plantings with a professional, finished look.
- Combine plants with similiar sun requirements.
- Select an assortment of forms, colors and textures for best display.
- Perfectly suited for containers, hanging baskets, window boxes and landscapes.

Care Tips:
- Allow soil surface to dry slightly between thorough waterings.
- Fertilize regularly to maintain healthy plants and to achieve maximum color.

-Part Shade
-Height 18"

This plant was chosen for my Sensory Garden because of its thick, soft, fuzzy leaves that are extremely aromatic when bruised.

My own personal experience with this plant indicates that it grows in more of a mounded upright form. The tag lists the plant as being upright to eighteen inches, but mine has mounded itself to almost two feet wide and eighteen inches high. In garden centers the plant has leaves roughly one and a half inches round, but they quickly grow to almost three inches round once they are in the ground.

These plants are very fleshy and almost succulent like, and like the succulents, this plant seems to do very well on the drier end of the spectrum. The plant that is currently (2001) in the Sensory Garden was a mature container plant that was thrown out at the end of the season (2000). It was salvaged, brought into my damp basement, and nurtured under lights until spring. During this overwintering it was attacked by a fungal disease and it lost many of its branches and leaves. After letting the rootball dry out rather thoroughly, the plant started to recover, and limped along until it could get outside in spring. After a short aclimation period outside it was put in the ground where it exploded with wild growth and continues to expand outwardly wider.

Like most variegated plants, the candlestick plant tends to sport off solid green branches as well as solid white branches, both of which need to be trimmed out. The all green branches are too dominant, and the all white branches tend to quickly look shoddy and burnt.