Summer can take your breath away.  Oppressive heat and humidity keep us quick stepping from air-conditioned car to air-conditioned home.  Is there a magic plant that will stand up to heat, gardener neglect, small amounts of moisture, and then pelting rainstorms?

In my own garden, sun coleus are the VIP's.  They hold up to the heat, humididty, and sizzling sunshine without a problem.  They even take shade, although their colors might suffer a fadeout.  They do equally well in the ground and in pots.  They do require snipping now and again to keep them in shape.  The pinched parts are easy to root.  Remove any limp tips before sticking the stems in a pot of soil-less mix.  Keep the pots watered and in the shade.  In a week or two, you have free plants.

Another heat-beater, a fairly new introduction, is 'Magilla' perilla.  Its leaves resemble sun coleus but it does not need much pinching to stay bushy.  It is multicolored pink, plum purple, and green, with colors deepening in sunlight.  Although it is a perilla, it is not invasive since it seldom blooms and so does not set seed.

Annuals are the summer workhorses.  A Purple Wave Petunia makes carpeting the flowerbed its life's work.  The dreaded deadheading is never required to keep this plant blooming.

Tropical plants love to spend their summers outdoors.  One of my old favorites is the Arabian Jasmine, Jasmine sambac.  It loves the heat and sun after a winter spent indoors.  Its tiny white flowers pepper the branches and release a wonderful heavy jasmine scent, strongest in the morning, more subtle in the afternoon.  Although it is a vine, it can be cut back into a more manageable shrubby pot plant.

The seeds of Abelmoschus manihot produce single, pale yellow flowers on the branches of about four foot stalks.  It is easy to see that it is related to the vegetable okra, Abelmoschus esculentus.

The Kaffir lily, Clivia miniata, is a tropical grown from bulbs.  It likes to be pot bound.  It produces strong stems of bright orange flower clusters in summer.  There is also a yellow flowered specimen.  Its dark green, strappy foliage looks good year-round.  It needs to winter indoors.

Here in the South, we require landscapes that can fend for themselves for a couple of months with just the occasional nip of a dead flower or the start-up of a sprinkler.  Save your breath.  These can take the heat.

---Posted by Anne K. Moore  April 1, 2007