September 28, 2012 -- mystery leaves

Oh, how I love these leaves! And the story behind them, too. Here's the short story behind them: I pulled these leaves off the bottom portion of larger stems from a plant I was trying to root. Here are the larger stems in their rooting bottle.

 

The longer story is more interesting. A month or so ago I saw this beautiful, apricot-leaved annual growing at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden. It was over 3 feet tall and had lavender crape myrtles blooming behind it. Gorgeous. Vowed then that I'd try to find out what the plant was and try to grow it. I thought it might be some sort of coleus. On Tuesday of this week, I was back at Lewis Ginter and happened to walk by another stand of these plants as they were being cut back. I asked the gardener for a couple of stems, which she graciously gave me. I think she also told me the name of the plant (an annual, not coleus), but for the life of me I can't remember what she said. Anyway, I now have this plant rooting in the windowsill (and in pots in the shed). As I was getting the stems ready for rooting, I was pulling off the lower leaves, but they were too pretty to throw away so I dropped them into the nearest water-holding vessel, which happened to be a wine glass in the sink. Later, I lifted this glass of leaves to the windowsill where the light hit it making all those wonderful colors even more luminescent. This morning, I spread the leaves out into two glasses, where they look even better, because you can see through some of the leaves and their overlapping creates even more color variations. As the light kept changing this morning, looking through these leaves was almost like looking through stained glass.