Caladiums – Update

In 2021, I wrote about how, for over 20 years, caladiums had been a regular feature on display during the summer on the front porch of our house.  I don’t know if you have had caladiums before, but they come in a variety of beautiful colored leaves.  Since they predominately prefer partial to full shade it makes them ideal for covered porches.  Now in 2025, that consistency of front porch foliage has reached a quarter century.

When I first started planting caladiums in pots on our front porch, I typically bought live plants in the spring.  To get a full look in two separate pots, this approach can be rather costly.  To defray the cost, I tried digging up the bulbs and storing them in the garage for spring planting only to have to buy new plants in May or June when it was obvious nothing was going to come up.  I even tried storing the entire planters in the garage over the winter without success either.  So, each year, I would buy new live plants to transplant into these planters.

That is until one year on a cold Saturday in February, while shopping at my favorite hardware store, I discovered they had caladium bulbs for sale.  With 5 or 6 bulbs in a bag for about $7, I realized I could have a huge number of beautiful caladium plants for what I was spending in live plants each year.  And so began an annual pilgrimage to that same store each winter to get my newest stock of bulbs.

In the spring of 2022, I could no longer find them at that hardware store.  I wondered if availability of caladium bulbs was just another casualty of the pandemic.  But when I contacted a local privately-owned nursery, I learned that they did have caladium bulbs.  When I went there, I discovered that they indeed did have a number of varieties but they were sold in bulk and at a per bulb cost, they were on the pricey side.  Undeterred, I bought ten for about $40.

Each year after that, I returned to that private nursery for a dozen.

I would try different varieties each year although my favorite always seemed to be the Carolyn Whorton variety.

These offered a beautiful blend of pink and red veins bordered by dark green trim.

Because of the initial costs of these nursery-sourced bulbs, I thought about trying to dig them up again. At the end of the season and once we had had our first frost which killed off the exposed leaves, I carefully pulled them from the soil and stored them in the garage over the winter.  Given my lack of success in the past, I would still buy new bulbs for the front porch and plant the prior year’s bulbs in pots in the backyard.

The first year I did that, I had success!  I can only assume that with the higher cost per bulb from the nursery, and presumably higher quality, that I could get many of them to rebloom the next year.  So, each year I needed to find more pots in the backyard for the old bulbs.

Along that vein, this year, I decided to tackle a complaint that my wife had been lodging for a while.  In front of the deck, we had two large pots that I planted elephant ears.  Just like with the caladiums, I would dig up the bulbs each fall and then replant them in the spring.  However, strangely, each year the elephant ears seemed to get bigger and bigger which ultimately impeded someone going up the steps, and thus my wife’s protest.

However, my move of old caladium bulbs to these big pots in the back did not work out as well as I had hoped.  It is always a chance that not all bulbs will regrow the next year and most of the ones in the left side pot just didn’t reappear.  So, in 2026, I will probably buy bulbs for these two big pots in the backyard as well as new ones for the front porch.

Rather than get a mixture of bulb types, I always get a single variety.  This year I did the same.   But once they began to sprout, I discovered that a different variety bulb had somehow gotten mixed into the bulk container from which I had selected my bulbs.

Over the summer, every time I saw the front porch, it reminded of that movie, Something’s Gotta Give, where Jack Nicholson is always putting a black rock in Diane Keaton’s bowl of pristine white rocks.

But my wife said she liked our caladiums that way which made me think I should consider getting a variety of bulbs in the future.

Now that I have switched to higher quality bulbs, each winter I look forward to the day I can go to the nusery to pick out that year’s crop.  I usually start calling them in March and as soon as they are available, I head over.  Their sign says they should not be planted until overnight temperatures are consistently in the 60s so I do have to wait sometimes a month before planting them.  But then as soon as I do, I anxiously look for the first shoots to begin to emerge to explode into a colorful display.

I have always loved 4^th of July fireworks display.  Maybe that’s why I love caladiums so much as they remind me of an impressive grand finale firework display frozen in time.  And when the bulbs are at their peak usually after the 4^th of July, I capture what has become an annual photo of our front porch caladiums!