Bees Do It. And So Can You.

Just as the right patterned fabric or a few throw pillows can make a whole room work, so functions coleus in the garden.

It’s hard — impossible? — to think of another plant whose varieties display such a diverse concentration and location of color in their leaves. Coleus’s seemingly infinite genetic expressions can inspire a gardener planting a container or an entire bed, lending color nonstop through a stretch of frost-free months.

If the experience of Chris Baker, a longtime nurseryman and passionate coleus breeder, can be submitted into evidence, these plants help make for a rather color-filled life, too.

Mr. Baker recalls the windowsill above his grandmother’s kitchen sink a long time ago, where a little glass jar of water held the latest round of coleus cuttings that Grandma Gert was rooting. Their “crazy colors,” which he has likened to the botanical equivalent of a Hawaiian shirt, left an indelible impression. The image was still with him decades later when he came to the practice of propagating coleus himself — not on a windowsill, but in a greenhouse.

Young coleus plants propagated from cuttings of some of Chris Baker’s stock plants will make their way into the retail sales area at Baker’s Acres Greenhouse.

His was an indirect route to nurseryman and then, in time, to coleus breeder, said Mr. Baker, who after earning a degree in music from Ohio State University set his modest career goal as “rock star.”