Welcome @NAME@..... Welcome to the September, 2005 edition of The New Perennial Insider, sent to members of our New Perennial Club at Heritage Perennials®. Each month we will be featuring a close-up look at a new plant or group of perennials, giving you the "insider story" on how that plant came to exist, pictures, descriptions and growing information. Starting next month we'll also be including feedback from our New Perennial Club Members, telling how these plants are performing in actual gardens across North America. Every plant has its good points and its bad points, and we're not afraid to tell both sides of the story! We welcome your feedback, and encourage you to login and leave your comments through the New Perennial Club. Remember, each time you register a plant or leave a comment, it gives you another chance to win our great monthly draws for prizes! Just click the CLUB HOMEPAGE link on the toolbar above for full details. NOTE: We invite you to participate whether you live in Canada or the USA. And, it doesn't matter if you purchased the plant as a Heritage Perennial® in a blue pot. So long as it appears as a qualifying plant in our New Perennial Club, we encourage your feedback and comments. To pull up the entire list of close to 700 qualifying Club plants, just head to www.perennials.com and type NPC into the #2 Search box, then follow the links to find the 7-digit plant number needed to register each one. John Valleau, editor of www.perennials.com (jv@valleybrook.com)

BATTLE OF THE CONEFLOWERS: What's New in Echinacea

It all started with one of our most popular and best-known North American native wildflowers, Purple Coneflower or Echinacea purpurea. Long popular as a border flower in Europe, what really put Echinacea on the map in recent years is the booming health food and natural pharmaceuticals industry, so much so that the botanical name is now a household word! Several "improved" seed strains have come and gone over the years, but still commonly offered are ones like 'Magnus' (with flat magenta-pink petals) and the graceful white-flowered 'White Swan'. Echinacea purpurea is native over much of the eastern half of the continent, from Iowa, Michigan and Ohio to the east coast, Texas and Florida. This species has become naturalized in so many regions that its actual native distribution is something taxonomists are still arguing about. Other less common species occasionally offered include Echinacea angustifolia (Western Coneflower) with pale-pink, very droopy petals, Echinacea pallida (Pale Purple Coneflower) and the rare, yellow flowered Echinacea paradoxa.

Let the crossing begin...

Although it was reported in the late 1960's that the various species of Echinacea could be crossed, nobody seems to have made the effort until Dr. James Ault of the Chicago Botanic Garden began to assemble a collection of species and cultivars in 1995. His first crosses began two years later, focusing on hybridizing between species, or interspecific crosses. The resulting seed was gathered, germinated and grown on for a year or two, the new plants allowed to flower and careful notes made of their traits for further crossing. Controlled breeding work produces thousands of plants that never make it beyond the trial field, but one in particular truly stood out. It was selected and named 'Art's Pride', now marketed as Orange Meadowbrite™ (pictured, right). 

Once a new variety of Echinacea is chosen, the next headache is bulking it up to the point it can be offered for sale in large numbers. The older seed strains were simple to propagate, but almost all the new hybrids and cultivars must be increased vegetatively by division (very slow), by stem cuttings or root cuttings (very time-specific), or in a laboratory by tissue culture cloning. That sounds simple and easy, but the plants that come out of the lab are not always identical to the one that went in. A good example of this is the amazing double-flowered 'Razzmatazz' which has proven to be rather unstable in tissue culture — at first, a high proportion of the cloned plants turned out to be single-flowered, but now this cultivar is bloomed first by the offshore grower, to ensure that plants sold are true to form (which explains their high price). Another surprise came about with the cloning of Orange Meadowbrite™, when it was discovered that a proportion of the plants coming out of the lab had flowers of a different colour, a lovely shade of yellow. These plants were stable, the flowers unusual and distinctive, so it was given the name Mango Meadowbrite™ ('CBG Cone 3'). Both of these Chicago Botanic Garden introductions have been rated hardy to USDA Zones 4 to 9. The E. paradoxa parent has contributed the unusual orange and yellow flower tones to these selections, but they've also inherited very narrow petals and narrow leaves with a look some gardeners find to be sparse. During this past spring — rather a cool one in many regions — these hybrids were slow to emerge from the ground, causing a panic among the more anxious gardeners who had paid a small fortune to purchase these selections in 2004. We heard from many gardeners who were concerned early on in the season, but hardly any reported back that their plants had died, even after a fairly tough winter. A quiz of our own staff at the nursery revealed that these two hybrids just seem to be slow to wake up.

The newest introduction from the Chicago Botanic Garden is Pixie Meadowbrite™ ('CBG Cone 2')
scheduled for release in 2006. This one is compact (14 to 20") with narrow leaves and nice full flowers of medium pink with a burgundy-red cone.

They came from the sky...

The Saul brothers at Itsaul Plants (near Atlanta, Georgia) have also been busy working with Coneflowers. Their first two releases are the primrose-yellow Big Sky™ 'Sunrise' (pictured, left) and Big Sky™ 'Sunset', with electric-orange flowers. Both of these feature nice wide petals and have substantial foliage that mounds up well. In our hot summer, 'Sunset' seemed a bit later to bloom and the flowers faded somewhat in the heat to more of a salmon-coral tone, but 'Sunrise' was absolutely stunning with it's subtle shading that blends with absolutely anything in the garden. I suspect in a more typical and cooler summer, 'Sunset' will be more of a true orange; it was just a heat thing. Look for more good things coming from the Saul brothers, particularly the summer 2006 introduction of Big Sky™ 'Twilight', with fragrant, deep-rose (ALMOST red) drooping petals around a button-shaped red cone.

In more traditional shades...
 

The species E. purpurea still continues to give rise to interesting selections, mostly in shades of magenta to soft rose pink. TerraNova Nurseries has released several in recent years, including 'Fancy Frills' (pictured, right), 'Fragrant Angel', 'Green Eyes' and 'Hope', this last one with soft baby-pink petals around a great big rusty-orange cone. Colour breaks do occur still, including two European selections that are outstanding, 'Jade' with flat white petals around an inky-green eye, and the rich magenta-purple tones of 'Vintage Wine'. Another newer introduction has a rather unlikely and bizarre double-flowered form, but not with the typical extra petals that daisy flowers usually exhibit. In 'Doubledecker' there is an entire miniature second flower that emerges from the top of the cone of the lower bloom, something like a hose-in-hose primrose. At least... there is supposed to be a second flower! Seed suppliers told growers upon release that the first year blooms are mostly single, with doubleness tending to occur in year two, and that a small proportion of the plants would remain single forever. The jury is still out on this, but discussion recently on our Let's Talk Perennials Forum makes me wonder if the proportion of singles is much higher than we had expected. We shall keep you posted!

Surprisingly fragrant!

It was the TerraNova introductions of Echinacea that first made claim to good fragrance in the blooms, something that I was skeptical about at first. Let's face it, the daisy family is not renowned for pleasant fragrance, as a whole. They attract pollinating insects by providing a nice button or cone loaded with pollen and surrounded by an outer ring of contrasting petals to attract attention, literally a platform for bees and butterflies! Shasta Daisies have a somewhat offensive, almost soapy smell to the blooms, but nearly all of the new Coneflower hybrids do have pleasant fragrance, some of them with a distinctive rose or citrus nose. This makes them even more useful as indoor cut flowers.

Variegated, if you MUST...

And for those that must die with the knowledge they collected every variegated plant that exists on the face of the earth, TerraNova Nurseries unleashed 'Prairie Frost' (with smallish flowers and creamy leaf edges, pictured left) and 'Sparkler' (the leaves dappled all over with cream). Both of these seem less vigorous than green-leaved forms, understandable since they lack chlorophyll, and they may also want the protection of afternoon sun to prevent scorching. I would use them in containers or near the border edge, where their unusual foliage will show to best advantage. It's worth noting that, in warm-summer regions, 'Sparkler' usually loses its variegation, becoming all-green leaved by blooming time, while 'Prairie Frost' seems to maintain its creamy margins. Are these two good and reliable landscape plants? Time will tell, but both seem mainly to have collector's appeal in my mind.

Where is it all going?

Because tissue-culture techniques allow a breeder to go from a single plant to thousands within a year or less, it's anybody's guess what the next big breakthrough in Echinacea is going to be, and when. I can only tell you what I hope to see! I want a red Coneflower, a true, clear REAL red. I want a deep mahogany one, almost brown, or one with the muted purple shades of a 'Patty's Plum' Oriental poppy. I want to see some good self-supporting tall Coneflowers in all shades... 5 or 6 feet tall, for the back of the border. Yellow is nice (I do love Big Sky™ 'Sunrise') but the quest for a golden-yellow Echinacea seems to me like an attempt to turn the Coneflower into just another Rudbeckia. That's my wish list, but only the breeders' magic and a bit of time will tell the rest of the story.

Want to know more?

We have eighteen Echinacea selections designated as New Perennial Club plants. To view them, head to our Heritage Perennials® homepage and type NPC into the #2 Search box, then hit search. On the next page, click Echinacea and you will be able to view the thumbnail descriptions. These lead to full plant profile pages, which are even printable. To register an Echinacea, login to the Club then just type in the seven-digit number found on the plant profile pages. Be sure to include the decimals in the number.

To see our complete listing of 30 Echinacea species and hybrids, type Echinacea into the #2 Search box, hit search and follow the links to the individual plant profiles. Please note that not all 30 of these qualify as New Perennial Club plants, only the 18 mentioned above.