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The
Plants
They’ll Be Talking About At
The Garden Walk—
---Next Year
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The annual Theatre West Garden
Walk has become the premier garden event on the
annual Wyobraska gardening calendar. The curtain
rises on this year’s garden walk at 8:00 a.m. this
coming Saturday morning. Tickets are available at
regional garden centers, the Theatre West Box
Office, and at any of the gardens at the morning of
the walk.
Each year’s garden walk seems
to “discover” a few new landscape or garden plants
that go on to become Wyobraska landscape and garden
stars. It’s always a little hazardous for me to
predict what plants will be “oohed” and “aahed” over
by the garden walk attendees, so I will make no
predictions regarding this year’s winners.
However, being the bold
prognosticator that I am, I will make a few
predictions about some plants that are likely to be
winners in future years. This strategy could be a
good one for both the writer and the reader of this
column. The reasons are simple. It’s a good
strategy for me, because if my predictions fall flat
on their flower petals, no one will remember a year
from now. And it’s a good strategy for you readers,
because this gives you a chance to hunt down and
plant these potential future winners for yourself.
Then at next year’s garden walk, when the party in
front of you is “oohing and aahing” over one of
these plants, you can nod your head knowingly,
recite the plant’s latin and common name, and then
say, “Yes, it is a nice plant, I have one in my
garden.”
So without further ado—a little
drum roll please. |
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Previous Articles
It's
Finally Spring - March 13
Spring Garden Calendar-March 20
No
Garden Left Behind-March 27
Planting Trees for a Cooler Earth in a Warmer
WyoBraska-April 3
Viburnums - Shrubs for Wyobraska Springs-April 10
Want A Water Conserving Lawn? You might already have
one-
April 17
Creating Long
Term
Tree-lationships April 24
Bigger, Bolder, Brighter,
Better—and Back In The Landscape May 01 & 08
Hardy Shrub
Roses
May 15
Another Look
at Native Plants
May 22
No Child
Left Inside
May 29
June
is Tree Care Month June 05
Summer Blooming Shrubs
June 12
Roses Are
Red.....
June 19
2007 Articles
2006 Articles |
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Tardiva Hydrangea
By now
most avid gardeners are familiar with the smaller
“Annabelle”-type hydrangeas with their large light
green leaves and even larger strikingly white
hydrangea blossoms. While their dried flower stalks
almost always retain an attractive appearance in the
landscape through winter, the Annabelle-type
hydrangeas need to be cut back to the ground each
spring. Not so with the Tardiva Hydrangeas. The
Tardiva Hydrangea is a permanent presence in the
landscape with a mature size of 6 to 8 feet.
Instead of the rounded flower form of most
hydrangeas, the Tardiva Hydrangea’s flower is a long
spike of white flowers with distinguishable separate
petals. It prefers shade, but will tolerate some
sun. It is a great choice for a large shady spot in
the landscape. It seems to be remarkably soil
adaptable. When in bloom through much of the summer
it is a spectacular plant.
Tardiva Hydrangea
‘El Dorado’ Feather Reed
Grass
With feather reed
grass already one of the most popular landscape
plants in Wyobraska, I don’t think that it will take
long for this cultivar with bright yellow variegated
foliage to catch on. It’s so new I haven’t even
planted it yet, but a few of my cutting edge friends
in the nursery business have given this plant high
marks. The difficulty may well be in not overusing
a plant with such bright foliage color. I would be
surprised if it does not prove to be readily
adaptable to Wyobraska landscape soils.
El Dorado Feather Reed Grass
‘Flutterbye’ Rose
Judging by this year’s Garden Walk
gardens, roses are back in the Wyobraska landscape
scene to stay. Of course most of the roses now are
hardy shrub roses, and it’s likely that one or more
new roses will be a star of each year’s Garden Walk
for years to come. I’ll put my money of a shrub
rose named ‘Flutterbye’. In more temperate climates
this rose is a climber, but in Wyobraska it seems to
stay a 3-5’ shrub. It’s flowers change color daily
from pink to yellow to orange, creating an
exceptionally dynamic flower display. It blooms
steadily all season from early June into October.
I know of one commercial landscape in Wyobraska
where this rose has been performing beautifully for
almost 7 years
Flutterby Rose |
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Ninebark—‘Diablo’, ‘Summer wine’, and ‘Coppertina’
Who would have
thought that plain old ninebark would be turned into
one of the showiest of summer shrubs. This medium
to large and rangy native shrub had all but dropped
out of nursery catalogues by the late 1990’s. Then
someone discovered and refined a red-leafed ninebark
that they named “Diablo”. I’m not a big fan of
large shrubs with colored foliage, but the color of
Diablo ninebark is so consistently vibrant that it
has made a believer out of me. Add to the maroon
colored foliage a white flower in June, attractive
bright red seed display in mid-summer and a
noticeable change of foliage color for fall, and you
have an outstanding medium to large accent shrub.
Ninebark 'Diablo'
Diablo Ninebark has
proven to be such a popular plant that plant
breeders continue to see what other foliage color
this plant is capable of. Two new prospects are
‘Summer wine’—a lighter color to the foliage than
Diablo, and ‘Coppertina’—described to me by an
excited plant salesman as having an “orange glow”.
You can’t always believe plant salesmen, but if he’s
right, this plant may just be the one with the most
“oohs and aahs” at next year’s Garden Walk.
Ninebark 'Summerwine'
Ninebark 'Coppertina'
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