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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Purple Hearts, a very tropical looking hardy perrenial.

Purple hearts (Tradescantia pallida "Purple Heart") are a beautiful groundcover that is often sold as annuals but actually can make fantastic perennials. I just started growing these beautiful plants last year and they have proven to have a lot of cold tolerance. They stayed green until New Years, handling temperatures in the 20s with only a little damage. Eventually they died to the ground, but in March they started coming back up!
It was a mild winter so a lot of unlikely plants did come up, but I can definitely see these plants surviving an average zone 7, New York winter. They are reliably hardy in zone 8 and up but they are hardy to at least zone 7 with mulch, possibly even zone 6b.
Here is mine right now as of early May. already with quite a few leaves.

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