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New Old
Flowers
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A few years ago a purple
coneflower was just a purple coneflower. Now the
mid-summer flowering, pink-petaled perennial, long a
staple of the perennial border, comes in a
mind-numbing array of colors, sizes, and petal
shapes and textures. Blanketflower used to be just
a good long-blooming perennial with an
orange-centered yellow flower. Now this flower,
widely used in xeriscapes, comes in a wide range of
equally colorful names and flowers from the
red-flowered ‘goblin’ to the you-guess-what-colors
‘oranges and lemons’. A similar explosion of plant
sizes, flower colors, and petal shapes has taken
place with Penstemon, columbines, coreopsis, Shasta
daisies, daylilies, and almost every other staple of
your mother’s perennial border.
Most of these “new” flowers are
simply the result of more intensive, but still good
old-fashioned plant breeding programs responding to
the gardening public’s voracious appetite for “new
and different” flowers. In these plant breeding
programs, sun-screen coated summer interns move
pollen around in fields filled with flowers, and
then a year later the resulting seedlings are
growing in another nearby field. As the new
seedlings mature and begin to bloom, another group
of sun-screen coated horticulture interns eagerly
scouts the field for the new colors, new petals, new
you-name-it feature that will be showing up in plant
catalogues in the next few years. (In the not too
distant future, new flowers are likely to be the
result of lab-coated technicians moving genes around
in a laboratory—but that’s another column).
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Previous Articles
A
Loooooong Winter
March 10
Just Dirt
March 18
Horse Manure & Hot Air
March 25
Mulch
to do this Spring
April 01
Creating Long Term
Tree-lationships
April 15
Spring Blooming
Shrubs & Trees
April 22
New
and Improved
Nebraska Arbor Day
April 29
A
Normal Spring
May 6
The Winter of Eight Moons
May 13
Adding Style to your Landscape
May 20
Adding Style to you
Landscape Part 2
May 27
Summer School
June 3
Signature WyoBraska Plants
June 10
It's Time to Fertilize Trees
June 17
A Prairie Garden Walk
June 24
Care of Weather Injured Trees and Shrubs
July 1
What Makes a Good Perennial
July 8
2009
Articles
2008 Articles
2007 Articles
2006 Articles
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One of the most respected of
these plant breeding programs has been located right
here in Nebraska at the West Central Research and
Extension Center in North Platte. Under the career
long leadership of Dr. Dale Lindgren, that plant
breeding program produced a remarkable number of
those new flowers that are now some of the most
popular old favorites—“Husker Red Penstemon” is,
without a doubt, the programs most famous plant
introduction, but Dr. Lindgren’s work also produced
several garden mums, several dianthus, more than
several Penstemon—his favorite flower, a few
ornamental prairie grasses, and even one
well-adapted Mongolian clematis.
If you haven’t tried some of
the “new” perennial flowers, here are a few
suggestions that are now showing up in Wyobraska
gardens:
Echinacea—commonly known as
purple coneflower—has long been a favorite
perennial, so it was a natural for plant breeders to
try to develop hybrids with new colors, flower
forms, and plant sizes. Not all of the new
Echinacea have been vigorous plants and some that
appear to be working well in other regions of the
country don’t seem to be working well in Wyobraska.
But the parent plants of these new Echinacea hybrids
are generally well adapted to prairie soil and
climates, so I expect that the problems with some of
the new Echinacea cultivars are likely the result of
plants with great new flowers being brought onto the
market before the vigor of the hybrid is
well-established. I have seen this be the case
frequently with new annual flowers. Here are some
of the new coneflowers that appear to be performing
well in this region. I look for there to be many
more in coming years.
Gaillardia, commonly known as
blanketflower, is another popular perennial because
of its long-flowering quality and its durability,
the ‘old’ gaillardia was a 2-3 year perennial that
reseeded vigorously enough to maintain its presence
in most perennial gardens. It’s commonly included
in wildflower seed mixtures for that reason. I
don’t know if the new hybrids will re-seed at all,
or if they do, if the seedlings will be true to the
parent plant. But the old blanketflowers were a
popular enough plant that I have no doubt that the
new ones will be even more popular. I have not
seen any that have not performed well through their
first season in a Wyobraska garden. I don’t have
enough experience yet to report on the longevity of
the new blanketflowers. Here are some of the new
ones that you may want to try:
Finally, I am particularly
interested in some of the new penstemons, because
they bloom early enough to add color at a time when
color is still in short supply in Wyobraska
gardens. Penstemons are native to almost every
continent, and many penstemons are sold in the
perennial trade. Only two or three of the 10 or so
species that are cultivated seem to work well in
Wyobraska. The two penstemon species that seem to
be producing the best hybrids for Wyobraska are
Penstemon barbatus—generally a mid-tall grass
prairie plants with spikes of pink, red, and blue
flowers, and penstemon pinifolius—a high desert wild
flower that performs well in Wyobraska xeriscapes.
Don’t be surprised if the penstemons in your garden
move around over time to find the more open and
drier spots. Here are some of the barbatus hybrids
that are working well:
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