January/February 2002 Excerpt

Excerpt from New and Award-Winning Plants for 2002  By Carole Ottesen


Along with a keen appreciation for the scent of thawing earth and gratitude for a good, soaking summer rain, gardeners are hard-wired with an intractable urge to acquire more plants. And each year, as the days begin to lengthen, the garden industry caters to this obsession. It offers, on the one hand, a panoply of tempting new introductions labeled with adjectives so beloved of American marketers: improved, bigger, more compact, better, disease resistant, variegated, bicolored, double flowered. On the other, through a number of regional and national award programs, it calls attention to outstanding plants already in the trade.

Here’s a sampling of intriguing new plants along with time-tested plants receiving accolades.

Annuals

The first round of temptations comes in darkest winter with the arrival of the seed catalogs. For winter-bound gardeners stricken with plant lust, catalogs make compelling bedtime reading. 

New this year is a creamy white California poppy (Eschscholzia californica ‘Milkmaid’) from Mr. Fothergill’s Seeds Ltd. that is just under 10 inches tall, with ferny blue-green foliage. Much taller—up to four feet, with four-inch, mop-headed flowers that resemble full-blown peonies—Poppy ‘Peony Mix’ is an assortment of annual poppies in shades of white splashed pale salmon, pink, salmon, white and black, offered by the Park Seed Company.

Once the weather warms up, the garden centers begin stocking flowering annuals. Some of these will be unusual species or new takes on old favorites such as those offered by Proven Winners, a wholesale cooperative with members around the country and in Canada, Australia, and Europe. Among Proven Winners’ 25 debutantes are a pure white hybrid Bacopa ‘Cabana’, an eight-inch-tall, ground-covering annual for part shade; a new million bells (Calibrachoa ‘Apricot’) that features oodles of tiny, pale salmon petunialike flowers on trailing stems; and four more “Supertunias,” the company’s name for its line of vigorous, trailing petunias. This year’s offerings feature double flowers in shades of pink and lavender.

Vegetables 

The photos of juicy, red tomatoes in catalogs awaken the longing for the real thing. ‘Health Kick’, an F1 hybrid from Seminis seed company, is not only tasty, it delivers 50 percent more lycopene, an antioxidant reputed to have cancer-fighting properties, while it produces abundant plum-shaped fruits on wilt-resistant vines in 72 days. 

Faster to come by are the lettuces. Mesclun ‘Italian Misticanza’, from Renee’s Garden, is a mixture of chicories, endives, and leaf lettuces that can be harvested in six weeks. Loose leaf lettuce ‘Hyper Red Rumple’ from the Territorial Seed Company produces its deeply crinkled, plum-colored leaves in just 45 to 55 days. Worth waiting for is ‘Super Heavyweight’, the biggest bell pepper you’ve ever seen. A new product from Seminis, it’s the kind of pepper that might take a blue ribbon at the county fair.

Herbaceous Perennials

Among the newest herbaceous perennials this year is Echinacea ‘Kim’s Mophead’ (Zones 3–9, 12–1), a compact white coneflower that grows to between 18 and 24 inches tall, with tousled double petals. Discovered and introduced by Pierre Bennerup of Sunny Border Nurseries, Inc., in Kensington, Connecticut, it is a sport of the already diminutive ‘Kim’s Knee High’.

A new Lenten rose (Helleborus 5hybridus ‘Mrs. Betty Ranicar’) bears gorgeous, double, pure white flowers. Named for the Tasmanian plantswoman who developed it, ‘Mrs. Betty Ranicar’ grows 18 inches tall, blooms in early spring, and is expected to be suited to Zones 4–9, 9–1. Available this year from Thompson & Morgan seed company, it is said to come true from seed 85 percent of the time.

“Rare” and “unusual” apply to most of the offerings at Heronswood Nursery in Kingston, Washington, co-founded by Dan Hinkley. Among Heronswood’s 2002 introductions is what Hinkley describes as “an herbaceous hydrangea,” Deinanthe bifida ‘Pink Kii’ (Zones 5–9, 9–5), a form of a species collected by Hinkley in Japan. It produces hydrangealike heads of nodding white flowers with pink sepals on two-foot stems of glossy foliage. ‘Pink Kii’ grows best in a shady spot with cool, moist soil. 

A new introduction from Terra Nova in Tigard, Oregon, Heuchera ‘Amber Wave’ (Zones 4–8, 8–1), sports ruffled, amber-colored foliage that earned it a best new plant award at one of England’s largest nursery trade show. It grows about a foot tall and bears pale rose flowers.


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