Heuchera – Who needs flowers, with leaves like these?

When talking about beautiful flowers, the leaves are usually afterthoughts. As a rule, leaves are to flowers what pedestals are to statues. They’re there to set up and show off the dazzling colors of the intricately designed flower. The leaves rarely compete with the flower, and never upstage it … unless, that is, we’re talking about the Heuchera plant.

There are between 50 and 70 species of Heuchera and hundreds of hybrids, but no matter the type, they all have stunning and spectacularly colorful leaves, leaves that far outshine their modest and usually pale flowers.

What makes these leaves so fantastic? First off, altogether, Heuchera plants cover an impressive array of hues – from purple and bronze to chartreuse and silver and all the other various gradations of red and yellow and green.

A sampling of the names of various huechera plants provides an even better sense of the range (and refinement) of color possibilities: apple crisp, beaujolais, creme brulee, berry marmalade, berry smoothie, blackberry crisp, blackberry jam, brownies, brown sugar, cafe ole, cappuccino, caramel, cherries jubilee, cherry cola, frosted violet, georgia peach, georgia plum, ginger ale, ginger peach, green spice, key lime pie, lemon chiffon, licorice, marmalade, midnight rose, mint julep, mocha, paprika, peach crisp, peach flambe, pear crisp, persian carpet, pinot gris, pinot noir, plum pudding, plum royale, root beer, sparkling burgundy, tiramisu, strawberry candy, sugar plum, vanilla spice.

And even more impressivley, the color scheme is varied within each and every individual plant. They take advantage of every part of themselves to display a wide array of colors. In addition to the overall hue of the leaf, the veins of the leaves are often a different shade or color, and the underside of those leaves can also be a different color. In addition, the stalks rising up from those leaves are often another color, and then finally, the little coral bell flowers on the top of those colored stems cap off the color palette with one last color accent.

Even better, the principal leaf color itself often changes over the course of the year. The Huechera hybrid Peach Flambe, for instance, has flaming red foliage in the spring, a peach tone in the summer, and develops a deep plum color by the fall.

And as an example of the multi-color options an individual Huechera plant can show off, here’s Exhibit 1: the Root Beer huechera leaves are indeed rootbeer colored in general, but with the occasional greenish-gold and chili-red leaf thrown in with veins the color of root beer. And then out of these root beer leaves arise red stems and “mellow-yellow” flowers.

Exhibit 2: the Miracle Heuchera plant has chartreuse leaves with a splash of reddish-purple in the center that eventually develop into rich brick red leaves with either gold or chartreuse edges. And all of this is set off by silvery undersides.

Exhibit 3 – the Crimson Curls heuchera has bronze-brown foliage with dark crimson undersides and creamy white flowers on burgundy colored stems. (And these exhibits go on and on and on, with more variations, apparently, than all the colors of the rainbow.)

But perhaps best of all, heuchera plants are perennials which means they continue to display their spectacular splashes of color all year round.