This year, it is time: It's Lime Time.

Lime Time is a ColorBlaze coleus selection that has proven itself, earning Perfect Score and Top Performer awards from north to south. This will be the easiest plant to grow, offering the most riveting color you can add to your landscape beds.

The Garden Guy challenges you to find another color that clashes with ColorBlaze Lime Time coleus. In fact, Lime Time will make all colors and plants more beautiful than you ever imagined. What your friends and family will really think is that the coleus is the main feature and the partners were simply added on.

Lime Time has the ability to add needed pizzazz to hibiscus, hydrangeas, Hawaiian Ti plants and more than I want to list. Your perennial bed will explode with color thanks to Lime Time. While the perennials cycle in and out of bloom, Lime Time always looks like the star that it is.

ColorBlaze Lime Time will reach 24 to 40 inches in height with a 30-inch spread. In other words, it will look like a flaming lime-colored shrub until frost. It dazzles in sun or shade in my zone 8 Georgia garden. It is slow to flower, but when it does, you can pinch it to keep it bushy or let the light blue flowers develop and give nectar to bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. By all means, it is a thriller if you want to plant in containers.

It is not fussy about soil, though tight compacted clay seldom yields the perfect plant. Don’t forget though, you will be using ColorBlaze Lime Time as a companion to whatever your heart desires so your bed will already be prepared for the coleus.

So many of my companion plantings have come about really by accident. You know Lime Time will always be perfect and make everything look better, but there are those instances where you look at the result and say, "Oh my!" Such was the case this past summer when I planted it with Heart to Heart, Clowning Around caladiums. I said it, "Oh my!"

ColorBlaze Lime Time looks like it was made to go with blue, like the Totally Stoked Riptide Stokes aster. Work in some orange like Hollywood Hibiscus Disco Diva and you’ll have a deluxe triadic harmony color scheme.

Thus demonstrates the affinity that Lime Time has for orange. One of my all-time favorite partnerships is the Lime Time color paired with Color Coded Orange You Awesome coneflowers. This may elevate the "Oh my!" comment to an "Oh wow!"

I have one bed where I like to strategically place five Lime Time coleus about 4 or 5 feet apart. As they mature through the season, it’s like they become Lime Time Lanterns illuminating their partners.

Son James has been ever so bold using Lime Time like a hedge in front of taller Red Star cordyline plants that gave a yucca like look. The bed also featured Uproar Rose zinnias and white SunPatiens.

As planting season is ever so close, just keep in mind there are 18 ColorBlaze Coleus varieties to choose from.

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(Norman Winter, horticulturist, garden speaker and author of “Tough-as-Nails Flowers for the South” and “Captivating Combinations: Color and Style in the Garden.” Follow him on Facebook @NormanWinterTheGardenGuy.)

(NOTE TO EDITORS: Norman Winter receives complimentary plants to review from the companies he covers.)

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