These are the All-America Selection winners for 2005:
Gaillardia aristata Arizona Sun. Cut this compact plant for bouquets of eye-catching flowers of mahogany red with bright yellow petal edges.
Vinca First Kiss Blueberry. The first blue-flowered Catharanthus rosea is an AAS winner. The heat- and drought-tolerant plant has large 2-inch single blooms with a darker eye.
Zinnia F1 Magellan Coral. Fully double 5- to 6-inch blooms gleam with brilliant coral petals. Breeders improved the traits of flower production and early blooming.
Eggplant F1 Fairy Tale. An eggplant has not won an AAS award since 1939, so the dwarf Fairy Tale is an exceptional new variety.
Winter squash F1 Bonbon. Cucurbita maxima won for its restricted upright habit, earliness and superior eating qualities.
Tomato F1 Sugary. Judges raved about the sweet tomato flavor in the half-ounce dark pink fruit with a high sugar content of 9.5 percent.
National Garden Bureau choices
Begonias. Check out the rose-and-white blooms of Braveheart and the large blooms of Nonstop Deep Red.
Calendulas. The heirloom Radio (1930) with its quilled petals of shining orange has been reintroduced; Nichols Garden Nursery in Oregon bring us Sunshine Flashback, long bright yellow petals with a flashy red underside.
Geraniums. Black Velvet Scarlet should flower from May to October on 10-inch-tall plants with dark foliage.
Larkspurs. Parisian Pink has florist-quality spires with rose-pink blossoms that carry a hint of salmon, and 3- to 5-foot stems.
Phlox. Brilliant is the reintroduced heirloom annual from 1901 that’s cold- and frost-tolerant.
Rudbeckia. Maya is the world’s first dwarf double-flowering rudbeckia.
Sweet pea. The red of the dwarf Villa Roma is so stunning no one will notice you’re growing sweet peas in a container.
Vincas. Best New Name award goes to Sun Devil eXtreme Orchid With Eye, extraordinarily disease-tolerant and great basal branching. The runner-up is Rocky Blue With Purple Wing.
Vegetables
Carrot Cosmic Purple. Yes, purple exterior with the old-fashioned orange interior.
Lettuce Fireball. Large. Brilliant red with good heat tolerance.
Lettuce Marveille de Quatre Saisons. A centuries-old French heirloom bibb lettuce.
Mache Gala. Nutty-flavored greens are a cold-hardy European treat.
Spinach Choho Mustard. Nichols Garden Nursery of Oregon gives us quick-maturing heat- and cold-tolerant green.
Tomato Momotaro. Japan’s most popular tomato is available through Nichols Garden Nursery.
By Sharon Wootton
Special to The Herald
While some still cling to faint hopes for a miraculous late-winter snowstorm, gardeners have already moved their focus to what’s new in the gardening world.
It’s often a challenge to define the word “new,” however, since it can mean new to a nursery or catalog, new to a wholesaler or new to nature.
“What’s new has a little wiggle room in the plant world but AAS makes it easy,” said Nona Koivula, executive director of All-America Selections.
“If a breeder enters the AAS program, the variety cannot be sold anywhere in the world. We launch the introduction and make it clear that this is a new variety on the face of the Earth,” she said.
The word “exclusive” apparently has a lot of wiggle room too.
One company touts its “mail-order exclusives,” including the new Echinaceas Sunrise and Sunset. A quick check of the Web, however, will find them for sale from several other sources.
Perhaps the phrase “mail-order” means the only catalog with Sunrise and Sunset, but it is another warning to spend less energy caught up in having “new” and “exclusive” in your yard and more energy on discovering what plants fit your aesthetics and growing conditions.
Breeders have again tinkered with nature to bring new slants to familiar plants.
“They’re artists because they have an intuition about crossing this inbred line with that inbred line, creating the F1 hybrid, then growing it out to learn if they’ve accomplished any of the improvements that they want to accomplish,” Koivula said.
Breeders enter their creations in the AAS testing program. Independent judges weigh the fate of the flowers and vegetables in summerlong trials around the country, looking for significant improvements in color, flower form, habit, flavor, disease resistance and length of bloom.
Perennials have been an emphasis with breeders for years after decades of focus on annuals.
“Perennial gardening is hot stuff,” said Nanci Allen, in marketing for the wholesaler Skagit Gardens in Mount Vernon.
“It’s nice to see some breeding work being done for strong garden performance, not just for pot performance.”
Allen likes the Echinacea Big Sky series with its fragrance and large flowers.
“This exciting new series has new color choices, orange and lemon yellows … And echinacea is such a good performing plant anyway, so to have new color choices is great.”
Euphorbia Tazmanian Tiger popped up in the Northwest Flower &Garden Show last year and started a buzz.
“From a distance, the foliage is so striking. Flowers are great, but you can garden with a tapestry of different foliages. And foliage colors can change with temperatures, so breeders work for nice fall foliage out of some plants,” Allen said.
“Foliage is around a lot longer than the flowers are. I get excited about a plant’s foliage and sometimes I will snip off the flowers if they’re insignificant.”
The 2005 Perennial Plant of the Year is Helleborus xhybridus, or Lenten Rose, commercially propagated from seed.
“Hellebores as a general garden plant are a no-brainer but a lot of people are afraid of them, in part because of the higher price,” Allen said.
“But it’s one of those special plants with evergreen foliage that doesn’t require high maintenance. That in itself makes them worthy.”
The cultivar Ivory Prince is related to the Lenten Rose group, said Karen Bunting of Plant Haven, which represents the English breeder. This is the first year that Ivory Prince is being widely marketed.
Its long-lasting blooms of ivory streaked with green and rose hues deepen with time and complement the blue-green foliage. And its flowers are upright, always welcomed, and predictable because it is vegetatively cultivated (similar to cloning) rather than grown by seed, Bunting said.
While many gardeners search out the new, others find it in their hearts to appreciate even the low-on-the-totem-pole commodity plant, the primrose.
“They’re so colorful and smell so good, how do you resist?” Allen asked.
“Primroses grab me every time after a long gloom-and-doom time. It’s nice to be greeted with that riot of color. There’s really nothing else that gives you that at this time of the year. They’re the right plant at the right moment.”
And let’s not forget about vegetables.
In this category, your local nursery and two Northwest catalogs are all you’ll need: Nichols Garden Nursery (Albany, Ore.) and Territorial Seed Co. (Cottage Grove, Ore.).
Nichols has the hybrid tomato Momotaro, the most popular fresh tomato in Japan. It has been sold in the United States as Tough Boy for its crack resistance and tolerance to heat. Nichols reverted to the original name, which refers to a Japanese folk hero.
Territorial has an interesting striped Roman for making tomato sauce, elongated tomatoes with orange striping that were developed by a Seed Savers Exchange member.
Whether a plant is “new” or has a well-tested track record, now’s the time to enjoy the seemingly endless options.
And don’t forget, your Washington State University Cooperative Extension agent and the experts at local nurseries are there to help select the right plant for your conditions.
Sharon Wootton is a regular contributor to The Herald. You can send e-mail to songandword@rockisland.com.
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