PlantFiles: Ornamental Maize, Japanese Corn
Zea mays var. japonica

If you want to grow corn purely for culinary or nutritional requirements this may not be the corn for you!

However, if you love culinary variety and you also love that extra flourish of ornament for your garden, your autumn harvest display (Thanksgiving holiday as well as Halloween) then this could be a very welcome addition to your garden!

Here are some of the virtues of this corn:
1) Small size great for small gardens.
Tri-color variegated leaves. White, various shades of pink and red, and green.
2) Small, perfectly shaped cobs of very dark red-purple-black kernals. After dried the husks can be pulled back for fall ornament and furthur drying.
3) Popped as with normal popcorn it may not have the "fluff" but has much more flavor and lacks the irritating seed hull that gets stuck between your teeth. Requires little or no butter or seasoning as has so much more flavor than generic popcorn!

This has been a fun edible for me and some of my neighbors. To keep the best variegation for the leaves plant more seeds than you intend to keep as final plants. Cull out the plants with less variegation on the leaves by snipping to ground level. All plants produce the same dark kernals but save the seeds from the most variegated plants for sucess in that area.