WHAT’S NEW
After a long day of shoveling out from the latest snowstorm, I love to turn up the setting on my heating pad and relax with the pile of garden catalogs that have accumulated over the past several weeks. Right now I am at the dog-earring of pages and affixing of sticky notes stage. I refuse to start figuring the financial part until the snow pile in front of my house is shorter than I am.
One of the most entertaining parts of a good wallow in the catalogs is sizing up the trends for the coming growing season. Horticultural fashion trends don’t move as fast as clothing style changes, but they move nonetheless. The following are a few of the more interesting ones.
Edibles: The backyard–and front yard–vegetable garden tsunami may have peaked, but a strong trend is still with us. Gardeners who love tomatoes have even more choices, especially among heirloom varieties. New cultivars of the most popular veggies, like pumpkins and lettuce mixes are popping up everywhere. If you like white pumpkins for fall decorating, you are in luck, because the seed and plant vendors are working overtime to provide them. Container gardeners can choose among about a thousand cherry and grape tomato varieties.
Echinacea: Color sells, especially in recession times. If you love echinaceas or coneflowers, you will go mad trying to pick from among the horde of new and slightly older entries in the crowded echinacea field. There are a million pastel varieties, some of which are scented. If pastels bore you, go with hot-colored garden stunners like the bright red-orange ‘Tomato Soup’ or the curiously named ‘Pow Wow Wildberry’, in a vivid shade of amped up rose-purple. You can get single forms in interesting colors like chartreuse and doubles with flowers that look like an explosion in a bird’s nest. Echinacea breeders have gone over the top and now you can follow them.
Vivid Foliage: Shade gardeners often have to rely on foliage plants to provide color. With an astounding array of gaudy coleus and caladiums hitting the market, it is very easy to create eye-popping displays–in the ground or in containers. Rex begonias, with their patterned leaves, have also become exceptionally popular. I find them hard to grow, but with light shade and the right amount of water, they are striking in pots.
Plant Like an Egyptian: One of the hottest things in container gardening is papyrus, or Cyperus papyrus, as it is known to horticulturists. It is a tall sedge, with four to six foot stalks topped by what look like a green sparklers. One of the available cultivars is ‘King Tut’. I saw this plant last summer at an upscale winery, holding court in the middle of a container garden planted in a half wine barrel. If you want to be truly “fashion forward” this year, buy a papyrus plant and make it the centerpiece of a large container display.
The Petunia Clan: Long reviled as bourgeois bedding plants, petunias are in vogue once more. The showiest new petunia is the eye-catching ‘Phantom’, with black-purple petals, dominated by a large yellow star in the center of each bloom. Calibrachoa, those petunia relations with the tiny bell-shaped flowers, are available in even more colors. I got some free calibrachoa from one of the seed companies last year and they bloomed steadily and colorfully throughout the season, changing my opinion of them completely.
Hellebores: Hellebore breeding is experiencing the same kind of exponential growth as echinacea breeding. Only fifteen or so years ago, Helleborus orientalis varieties were uniformly drab in color, with downward-facing blooms. People bought them because they are evergreen, bloom in part shade and provide six weeks of blossoms before all but the hardiest of the spring-blooming plants appear. Now, hellebores come in an array of colors–pinks, reds, blue-black, yellow and green. Double forms are readily available as well, and some cultivars even have upward-facing flowers.
Tropicals: Climate change, the vogue for “hot” colored gardens and possibly, the increased willingness of people to haul plants inside for the winter have all contributed to the growing popularity of tropicals like mandevilla, lantana, heliotrope and penta. These should be grown in containers if you live in a cold winter climate. New red-flowering mandevilla provides a pop of color on a trellis.
Coreopsis: Coreopsis used to come in every color of the rainbow, as long as the rainbow consisted of shades of yellow. Now coreopsis breeding has reached a crescendo, bringing gardeners all kinds of pink, peach and bi-colored varieties in addition to new yellow-petaled specimens, some with quilled petals and other enhancements. If you live in Zone 6, as I do, take care. Not all of the rosy coreopsis are hardy through Zone 6 winters.
So if you are looking for colorful plantings, this is your year. Of course, there is a danger of getting carried away and creating a garden that looks more like a fruit salad than a peaceful retreat. Right now, with the garden buried under tons of snow, even that sounds appealing.