New and Unique Plant Varieties

Allen Pyle: Hi, everybody. It is a real pleasure to be here. I am always happy to talk about plants and kind of the subtitle, or the real title of this plant talk is “I get paid to go to trial gardens and take pictures of cool stuff, and now I get to share it with you,” so I’m really happy to do that.

Professional plant trials are a little different than some of the gardens that you see. We have a number of really wonderful botanic gardens and public gardens in the state, and I really encourage you to get out to see what’s growing and see how people are using plants in those situations. Typically, professional plant trials include varieties that are not on the market yet, so that the professional industry can take a look a year early and say, “Ooh, we need to add that to our program.” So that is a real advantage on the professional side.

Now, just because something’s new on the market doesn’t mean, “A,” that it is going to be attractive to you personally. “B,” that it is going to be really needed on the market and different from other varieties and, you know, a good variety. And sometimes new varieties are designed to be helpful to the production side of professional horticulture. So they’re easier to produce, shorter production window. So they’re more economical for the professional side even though they might not look super different. So with that said, we’re gonna proceed on.

These are the variety trials that I got to check out in both Wisconsin and in Michigan. Michigan has a coordinated garden plant tour of professional propagation nurseries, one of which I used to work at, C. Raker & Sons, which was that overhead picture you saw at the beginning. They’ve got about seven acres of trial gardens now.

So we’re gonna start off with one of my favorite classes, edible plants. New for 2025, Basil Everleaf Lemon. This is what’s called a columnar basil. It grows upright. And the advantage of columnar basils is they’re great to harvest. You can cut ’em off four inches up. So you have sprouts, new sprouts can come out. And then you just strip the leaves off. It’s not all this branch stuff where you’re trying to use one of the cutters and end up with stem bits.

The other thing, the Everleaf varieties have delayed flowering. So you’re gonna get a longer harvest window ’cause typically once basil goes to bud, the culinary value goes down. So there are three other varieties in the series Everleaf Genovese, Everleaf Thai Towers, which is a Thai basil with kind of that licorice flavor, and Everleaf Emerald Towers. Really good varieties. Normally, columnar basils were only vegetatively propagated, so you did ’em from cuttings. These are all from seed. These will be widely available. And Everleaf Lemon did get the Green Thumb Award from the National Garden Bureau this year for 2025.

Okay, hot peppers. Habaneros typically are really hot. Too hot for most people. This is an F1 hybrid, early productive variety that’s lower in heat. It’s only about a third of the heat of a typical habanero. So it’s like 70,000 Scoville instead of 300,000. So if you are not a super hot-head, this is a great variety. I personally have picked 100 ripe peppers off one plant in one big pot of this variety. It’s a great variety. Most habaneros, the OP varieties, mature late in the season here, and this one will mature earlier. It’s a great variety, highly, highly recommend it.

Another habanero. I am a hot-head in terms of what I like to eat, spice-wise. This is a heatless variety. You can literally eat this off the plant, and you can experience the really interesting citrusy, sweet flavors of a habanero that are normally masked by a lot of capsaicin spice heat. It is an F1 hybrid, it’s reasonably early. This was a 2018 All-America Selections winner. So it is gonna be pretty widely available. And this one was bred by a company that used to be called Seminis, and now it is under the Vegetables by Bayer. Americans call it Bay-er, Germans call it Bai-er. Okay, so another good habanero.

Tomatoes, most popular garden vegetable. Normally we think determinate, shorter ones. Indeterminate, taller ones. Micro-dwarf. Interesting, huh? These normally get to be 8 to 12 inches, depending on the variety. This particular one is about 10 to 12 inches. Small cherry fruit, great for window boxes, and it is an F1 hybrid, so it is vigorous and productive and really, really good if you’ve got a limited, small space. And it’s also pretty early. A lot of times, tomato varieties will say, “Well, it’s 70 days from transplant,” and your transplant is four to six weeks old. This is 70 days from sowing, so it’s pretty quick. And this is a very small window box on my patio. So highly recommended, PanAmerican Seed. You’ll hear that name again. Okay.

If anyone has brought anything to throw or wants to storm out when I mention a genetically-modified variety, now is your chance. But give me a second first, please. The Purple Tomato. This is UK breeding from Norfolk Healthy Produce. It is an indeterminate cherry tomato, 70 days from transplant. It’s got a gene from snapdragon that is used as basically a volume knob. We call it a transcription factor in science, but it’s a volume knob. It turns up to 11 the purple that’s already in tomato, so that you can have purple all the way through. Previously, it was only the skin in sunlight that would develop that purple color.

This is an interesting variety. You can buy it online from Norfolk Healthy Produce. It’s 20 bucks for a packet. It’s been very expensive for them to develop and they need to recoup. It is starting to show up in markets, and different greenhouses will hopefully have it for sale in 2025 at a premium price because they need to recoup their investment. So, the fruit is solid purple all the way throughout. It’s very sweet, it’s delicious, it dehydrates well. The purple color is high in antioxidants. It’s also got an extended shelf life. So after you harvest it, the fruit lasts for a pretty good time. It’s just a natural thing not related to the GMO. The breeder is working on expanding the line, adding disease resistance, and I’m really excited to see what happens with this one. So not all GMOs are throwing-things worthy, which is good to know.

All right, perennials. Let’s talk about perennials. My favorite. Buddleias, compact Buddleias. This is a new class of Buddleia. Typically, Buddleias are herbaceous to woody, and they will normally get, you know, four to six feet. Depending on how severe the winter is, they may die back to the ground or die back partially. These guys are short, they’re like two feet. They’re zone 5a. Potentially good in containers. Is this something the market needs? I don’t know. Especially if you’re growing these in containers in Wisconsin, you probably best thinking of them as a woody annual and not a perennial.

So there’s other series out there. The Little Rockstars is from Dmmen Orange. This one, the flowers are a little stubby compared to a Buddleia. There are varieties typically that have kind of a curving, almost gooseneck-like flower. I don’t particularly like the stubby flowers, personally, but you may. All of these are very fragrant as well. So if you’re into fragrance. And there’s other colors in the series.

Another National Garden Bureau Green Thumb Award. Digitalis. So the foxgloves, the commonly grown foxglove is a biennial big flower. So it grows as a rosette one year and then flowers the next year and dies. These are hardy perennials, 5a, zone 5a. 18 to 24 inches. And they’re interspecific hybrids between Digitalis purpurea, the one I just mentioned, and the strawberry foxglove, Digitalis mertonensis. Neat plants. Do note, all parts of Digitalis are toxic. They’re a source of some interesting heart drugs. But you need to do science to work with that. So, not for eating. And there’s a companion variety. Lemon Cream Arctic Fox. Very similar characteristics. It’s a different interspecific hybrid. This is Digitalis purpurea times Digitalis grandiflora. I like Digitalis grandiflora alone. It’s a little bit more yellow flower color and about the same height, sometimes a little shorter. Again poisonous, so be cautious if you’ve got kids or pets or whatever.

Echinacea. This is Kieft Seed Breeding, which is one of the Ball Horticultural umbrella companies. Zone 4 hardy. This guy is fairly compact, like two to three feet, by up to about two feet wide. This is from seed. So historically, most of the extra colorful Echinaceas which are interspecific hybrids, are from vegetative propagation only. So they don’t come true from seed. There are a few mixed color varieties out there from seed, but this is the first series that is a F1 hybrid and it has individual colors. So this is a real breakthrough. Floriferous, drought tolerant. Pollinators will be happy if you plant it. There’s also a yellow. Yellow Ombre. Similar characteristics. This guy was a 2023 Regional All-America Selections winner in the southeast and the northwest. Good varieties. These should be widely available. They are significantly easier for the wholesale growers to produce because they can do them from seed instead of having to get in tissue culture plantlets, which is a very high-tech process of propagation. But these guys are from seed.

Another echinacea, the Sombrero series from Darwin. These are not quite zoned 4a, better in zone 4b. Orange flowers with an orange cone. Kind of a nice color. About 20 inches tall by 24 inches wide. And they are a little bit compact. Again, a good pollinator plant, drought tolerant, really nice variety.

Danziger, an Israeli breeding company. We call it Dan-ziger over here. [audience laughing] Has a series called Panama. And this is Panama Rose. There’s also a red. Very compact, 12 inches tall. Zone 5a. This is cutting propagated. And Danziger has cutting farms throughout different parts of the world, where they grow stock plants and then ship the growers unrooted cuttings. Really cool variety, nice, compact. Good in a container.

Phlox paniculata Jeana. This is a zone 3 hardy phlox. It is taller, like, four to five feet. Unlike most garden phlox, it’s got small flowers. In these clusters, the individual flowers are small. Kind of a lavender pink color. This has good powdery mildew resistance, which is a common problem on the garden phloxes. And this is highly, highly attractive to butterflies. In the Mt. Cuba Center trials, where they’re now looking at pollinator attractiveness of the different varieties they trial. This was the most attractive garden phlox in the trials. So, it is a Perennial Plant Association Plant of the Year for 2024. So this is one that you should see available on the market. And it’s a good variety if you have the space for a tall one.

Pycnanthemum. Pycnanthemum muticum is the 2025 Perennial Plant of the Year. It’s a native– it is not a Wisconsin native. It’s a fantastic pollinator plant. All the Pycnanthemum are, I highly, highly recommend them. They are a mint family plant, but they’re not an aggressive, spreading mint. They’re clumping, so they’re not gonna take over the world. This one is also, you can grow it from seed, and it will flower the first year from seed. The seed doesn’t need you to jump through all kinds of hoops and do stratification and scarification. It’s easy to do, as is the other Pycnanthemum that I’ve done, Pycnanthemum virginicum, which is a Wisconsin native. Okay.

This is the last perennial. Rudbeckia, which is one of my favorite genera. This is a variety called American Gold Rush, and this was the 2023 Perennial Plant Association Plant of the Year. It was developed to be resistant to a leaf spot disease that Rudbeckia Goldsturm commonly gets. Rudbeckia Goldsturm has probably been overplanted, which is why it so commonly has septoria leaf spot, which doesn’t really hurt the plant, it just makes the leaves look ugly. This is a compact habit about 22 inches, it’s vegetative, and it’s also an interspecific hybrid. So it’s got a little bit narrower, fuzzier leaves than a typical orange coneflower, which is wider and more dark colored.

All right. Deep breath, annuals. Once upon a time, I was just a perennial guy, and now I have to learn about other stuff. But I have learned to embrace petunias. There’s a lot of petunias coming up. So that said, Ageratum MONARCH MAGIC. It’s not just a marketing name. The first time I saw this plant in a trial garden, look what I had, a monarch hanging out on it. They really do like this. I think they have an affinity for this color purple, because a lot of the Liatris that they really love are very similar. So this is a more compact variety, up to a foot tall and almost a foot and a half wide. Good in containers and baskets, and it also does well in the landscape. Highly attractive to butterflies. And this is Ball Flora plant breeding. So it’s a sister company of PanAm, but it’s the vegetative side. So this is a vegetative variety.

Okay, Calibrachoas. So once upon a time in the ’90s, this weird little small-flowered petunia relative came to market. And it was kind of cool, but they were kind of hard to grow, and they were prone to getting chlorotic because they like acidic soil conditions, and they’re kind of finicky, and I was not very sold on them. But now, the breeders have worked on these quite a bit. And they are good plants. They’ve adjusted their tolerance to suboptimal conditions so that they are much, much easier to grow.

Now, why would you want a small-flowered petunia relative? Because the color range is much bigger. This is a series called Caliloco. Crazy calibrachoas. From Westhoff, which is a German breeder, and they have kind of carved a niche for themselves in doing some unusual funky colors, both in petunias, which you’ll see coming up and in the calibrachoas. So this series is new. It was new last year, and this is one of the more compact, kind of spreading trailing varieties. So it’s good in hanging baskets, mixed containers. It can be your spiller and, you know, some pretty unusual colors compared to what you typically see in a petunia. They also have Frankenberry, which, if you used to be a kid that loved sugary cereal, you should appreciate. Similar habit in terms of size and use.

LIA Abstract Lemon Cherry from Danziger. Another National Garden Bureau Green Thumb Award winner for 2025. There’s 14 colors in the series. Not all of them have this cool bicolor. But this is really an interesting one. It’s got kind of an irregular pattern, about 12 to 14 inches tall, kind of semi-trailing. So it’s mounds, but it spills over. This one was a top-10 pick in Plantpeddler Trials. That’s a propagator in Iowa that I did not get to visit this year, but I’m hoping I’ll get there next year.

All right, MiniFamous. Now, all these capitalized words with the trademark symbol sometimes gets more confusing than helpful to the consumer. So this is MiniFamous Uno, which is contrasted with MiniFamous Neo and also contrasted with MiniFamous Evo. [audience laughing] The Evos are all double-flowered. That’s easy. You can tell by seeing. The other ones, it’s habit differences. And breeders have this marketing name. They’re trying to get traction. They’re trying to get traction down at the consumer level, thanks to the wave petunias. The wave petunias started it all in terms of marketing. Okay, so this is a MiniFamous Uno. It’s compact, 8 to 10 inches by about 10 to 12 inches. It’s a double flower. It’s, if you like that. [audience laughing] I don’t particularly like double flowers in calibrachoa much, but you do sometimes get some interesting color effects, like this one has the bicolor.

Okay, Catharanthus, annual vinca. This is one that is more popular south. But as we are getting to experience lovely 90-plus-degree summers, it should be on your list to think about. These are very heat and drought tolerant. This particular variety, Nirvana XDR Blackberry. XDR stands for extreme disease resistance because there’s a disease called aerial Phytophthora, which is a big problem in some parts of the world. We don’t have it yet. Yet. As we are warming and our average temperature is going up, we are going to be getting to experience some of these diseases that historically, 40 below keeping out the riffraff has kept out. But that is changing.

So the Nirvana XDR series, well-branched floriferous, nice bicolor with a really nice purple, typically about 14 to 18 inches tall and a foot or so wide. There are some other colors that are pretty nice. We’ve got Cranberry Halo and Blue Halo. Again, these are something to keep in mind as you look for plants that are gonna be more adapted to the hot, dry conditions that we are experiencing more frequently. Okay. And this is all vegetative material propagated by cuttings.

So let’s jump to a seed variety. This is a nice red. There used to be a series called Titan from PanAmerican Seed. Apparently, this is called Titan-ium Really Red. I refuse to call it titanium if you put a hyphen in there. This is from seed. So it’s got that Phytophthora resistance, but it’s going to be more widely available and easier for you to get access to because you can do it from seed. There’s seven total colors. This is brand-new for this year. It’s about 14 to 16 inches and 10 to 12 inches wide. Cool. Probably not historically on the radar of Wisconsin growers, but definitely should be. Great for hot, dry sites. Good in containers, baskets, in the garden.

Okay, Dahlia Black Forest Ruby from Takii, which is a Japanese breeder. I know their American seed rep, and I’ve known him for a long, long time. Good guy. This is the first seed-propagated purple leaf variety, okay? Historically, the purple-leaf types were always propagated vegetatively. So this is a big, big breakthrough. And it got an All-America Selections award for 2025. One of the nice things about the All-America Selections awards is to get the award given to you for your variety, you have to have enough propagation material, whether it’s seed or cuttings or tissue culture, to actually supply the market well so that gardeners can actually get it and won’t be disappointed looking for it. So it’s a good program, this is a good variety. Definitely should be on your radar. About 20 to 28 inches tall and 10 to 14 inches wide.

Okay, sunflowers. This little guy, Sunfinity Double Yellow, has been the star of a number of professional trials. It was a top pick by the professionals out at the California Spring Trials last year. It has been highly rated in basically every trial it’s been in. It’s vegetative variety, it’s powdery mildew resistant. It’s a little bit taller, 3.5 feet, and it’s got these double blooms. It’s long, blooms all season. It’s pretty cool, but it’s a sunflower, you know. I was kind of surprised that everybody was so excited about it, but, you know, there you go. There’s other vegetative types, and typically sunflowers, you know, you can do from seed. They’re super easy, these are vegetative. So they’re gonna be potentially more premium price.

This guy is from Danziger, Sol Seeker Golden Nectar with a nice bicolor flower. Unlike the last one that has a fully double flower, this will be attractive to pollinators. You can hopefully see the little pollinator up on the top. Bicolor. I like bicolor flowers in the garden a lot. 24 to 36 inches tall. And there’s three other colors in the series as well.

All right. Osteospermum has come a long way, like calibrachoas. This is the 4D series, Blue Ice. It’s got kind of a double, doubled center, which, you know, you like or you don’t. These historically were very much cool-season plants. They hated hot summers and they would die out. But breeders have really improved that so that these can perform well from a spring planting throughout the season. But it does prefer cool temperatures, so it is something that you can get out a little earlier and enjoy a little earlier in the season. There’s seven other colors, solids and bicolors in the series. This is from Selecta.

And next up… Petchoa. Petchoa, what the heck is that? Well, it’s a hybrid of petunia and calibrachoa. Who knew? Historically, this has been a vegetative series, a vegetative crop. So you do the cross, you grow out the individual seedlings, you go, “That one’s cool,” and you put it into a tissue-culture lab, or create stock plants and take cuttings. This is from seed. This is the first one from seed. And again, it’s a PanAmerican variety, which is a really good breeder that does a lot of work bringing things into seed form from vegetative so that it’s easier to grow for the commercial growers as well as the home gardeners.

So this is a compact one in terms of height, but it does spread, so great for baskets, ground covers. And this received an industry publication, Greenhouse Grower magazine Medal of Excellence Industry Choice Award in ’23. It is a real breakthrough, and it does make this particular crop, the Petchoas, much more available.

But we also have some vegetative types. Sakata, another Japanese breeder. SuperCal Shocking Pink. Trailing, a little bit taller in the terms of, you know, two feet or so, but spreading habit, trailing. This was voted number two at the Commercial Growers of Wisconsin Trial Garden, which is at the Verona research facility that UW runs. Now, this is new for 2025, so you should probably be seeing this one on the market. And because the Commercial Growers of Wisconsin sponsor these trials, the growers that are involved with those trials then will offer these varieties and market them. So that should be something that you have pretty good access to. There’s also a Royal Red in this series, very similar, kind of a nice red with a dark throat.

Okay, here we go with the marketing again. SuperCal Premium. Well, why is it premium? Well, the flowers are a little larger. The habit is more mounding than trailing. There’s about 13 colors in the series. It’s about 14 to 20 inches tall and wide. Some interesting colors. You get a petunia-sized flower, a larger flower than a calibrachoa with some of the color range of the calibrachoas. But even within the series, there can be some variances in how vigorous these guys are.

This is the same trial garden that the last two shots were from, the last three. These particular colors, the sunset orange, the light yellow, and the French vanilla, are a little bit less vigorous. And in this particular trial garden, they do not baby these plants at all. No fertilization, supplemental irrigation. Throw ’em out and let ’em survive. Kind of like a lot of you guys probably do at your own homes, right? So that’s not to say that these colors are particularly bad, but they may be better spaced closer together. And this is the kind of thing that industry professionals learn.

Okay. So remember when I said you might not like every color that comes on the market? I call this a love it or hate it color. Some people are, “Ooh.” And I’m going, “Ugh.” AMAZONAS Plum Cockatoo. It’s a unique kind of ruffled-edged flower with the tricolor, attractive tricolor flowers. [audience laughing] It’s unique and different. This was a National Garden Bureau People’s Choice Green Thumb Award for last year when it was introduced. Danziger Breeding. You know, you can probably work with it in a mixed container with the right companions. But, yeah, this is not one of my favorites.

Danziger also has the CASCADIAS series. This is Arizona Sky. New for last year. Semi-trailing, about 12 to 14 inches tall and 14 to 18 inches wide. Interesting color. You kind of get that two-tone effect. In a lot of newer varieties, you kind of have a change of color as the flowers age, which can be interesting. There’s 20 colors totally in the CASCADIA series. So we’ll show a couple more of ’em.

Lilac Frost, this is kind of neat. Semi-trailing habit, new for this year. It’s got that full edge around the flower. So you really get a strong bicolor effect, which is kind of cool in that sort of lilac, light lavender color. There’s also Fuchsia Gem, or as they say in Europe, “Fook-sia Gem,” which is new for 2025. Very similar to the previous one. Interesting option. Could potentially be good in combination with the Lilac Frost.

And then we get back to Westhoff and their Crazytunias. This has been a mainstay for them for a while. There’s lots of red and blue and white petunias and even yellows now. They’re coming up with some funky stuff. This whole collection, it’s not really a series. It’s a collection of unusual colors and patterns. So just because Crazytunia Sacred Star grows a certain habit doesn’t necessarily mean that any other Crazytunia is gonna grow similarly. They can be fairly different. Okay. There’s 50 colors in the Crazytunia collection.

This particular one has a nice red and white bicolor, a little bit irregular red. And this is more upright and kind of cool. I’m gonna bang through these pretty quick. Frisky Orange. You know, you’ve got very irregular… Not all the patterns are quite as well formed as with the previous one. We’ve got Terracotta, which has that sort of pink and yellow, which may or may not be attractive to your personal taste. Again, this is an upright habit, but more of a mounded habit. We’ve got Cherries Jubilee, which has the white tips on red, which is kind of nice. Then we get into these cosmic varieties that have the irregular, lighter-colored edge, which are kind of cool.

And then we move on to a Danziger variety called Hippy Chick. Not sure I like the name. Oops, Hippy Chick Violet. Unique color with that edge of white and kind of a nice shape with the lobed flowers. If you saw this, you might not think it was a petunia initially. So kind of cool. It’s a vigorous one. It is spreading. Gets to be about two feet wide, about a foot tall.

Okay, so we talked about calibrachoa. We talked about petchoas. Well, what if you took petunias and you bred them to be small flowered? You get the Itsy series. It’s kind of a cute name. Spreading habit. Four to six inches tall by one and a half to two feet wide. So it’s like, well, “What if a petunia wanted to grow up to be a calibrachoa?” Syngenta’s Itsy series. This is vegetative.

Okay, here we go. Get ready to go “Ooh!” or “Ugh.” RAY Pistachio Cream. To a professional plants person, this looks like it needs some nutrition treatment and a pH check of the media. It is definitely unique. 12 to 14 inches tall by about 12 to 16 inches wide. Mounded habit, pretty large flowers. It’s not particularly one I would want to grow personally. However, in the same series, RAY Shadow, new for 2025, grows very similar in terms of size and habit. The flowers, open yellow with the dark throat and then they gradually age to this rose purple. Kind of interesting changing effect so that every time you go out in the garden, that plant is gonna look a little bit different, which is pretty cool.

We also have the Tea series of petunias. This is Pink Flamingo, which is a vegetative variety bred by Kerley & Co out of the UK and distributed by Beekenkamp, 18 to 24 inches tall and 20 to 28 inches wide. Kind of an interesting, antiquey flower color with the pink and little hints of yellow. We also have other varieties in the Tea series. Purple Green Edge. There’s been a few different green edge petunia varieties. This one to me looks particularly sickly and weak, with the irregular purple veining in the throat. There’s a Supertunia Picasso in Purple from Proven Winners. There’s a couple of varieties in the Crazytunia series, the Kermit Rose and the Kermit Purple. Again, if you like ’em, great. Go to town. Probably not gonna see ’em in my garden.

Petunia Painted Love, which you’d think that ’80s music fans might appreciate the name, and there could be a marketing plan. So purple with white throat and edge. So you get, we saw some varieties with the white edge and purple, but this one adds the throat, so it’s kind of nice. This one’s a little bit of a mounded semi-spreading habit.

Now we’re gonna talk GMO again. Try to calm down. Petunia Firefly. This has genes from fungi that glow in the dark, so it glows in the dark. It’s definitely different and unique. It was awarded by Time magazine one of the best inventions of 2024. It’s not the kind of thing that, you know, you’re gonna turn out the lights, and it’s gonna be, like, lighting up the room. It’s the kind of thing where it’s in a dark room and you go into the dark room and your eyes slowly adjust, and it slowly shows up. It’s kind of cool. It’s pretty expensive. It’s actually, the company, the trial garden photo of Raker, they are the exclusive propagator for North America, and they will happily sell you and ship you a plant directly to your door. It’s 30 bucks for a 4-inch pot and 30 bucks for shipping. [audience laughing] We’re all gonna run out and order those now, right? Yes.

So, Portulaca, another crop that maybe hasn’t been on people’s radar. In the old days, there was, like, what I used to call the cow patty, mounded habit. Double-flowered ones from seed. Kind of an old lady plant. No offense. These guys are vegetative selections that are more spreading or trailing habits. Most of them, but not all of them, have single flowers. The flowers are larger. These are really good heat, drought-tolerant plants. And they’re good pollinator plants as well, at least the single-flowered ones.

This one, the MEGA PAZZAZ from Danziger. You know they got a regular PAZZAZ, right, if they got a MEGA PAZZAZ? And they’ll probably come up with GIGA PAZZAZ in a couple of years. This particular variety was the Best of Trials winner at the Commercial Growers of Wisconsin trial in Verona. So really good variety in a trial where it got no care whatsoever. Looked great, spread well, pollinators loved it. Definitely want to keep your eye out for Portulacas.

The MEGA PAZZAZ Papaya Twist is new for 2025, has a nice bicolor. Pretty cool, again, single flower. Should make the pollinators happy. A good spreading habit. You can use it as a ground cover. It’s also great in containers. We’ve also got the MEGA PAZZAZ Tropical Twist new for 2025. A little bit more of a subtle bicolor. Similar habit. Are we tired of MEGA PAZZAZ yet? We have Mango Twist. This one’s a couple years old. Again, a pretty nice bicolor. Similar habit and size to the other varieties. Could work well in combination with them or with MEGA PAZZAZ Pink Twist. New in 2023.

There are other breeders that are doing these Portulacas vegetatively. The SeaGlass series from Westhoff. Vivid bicolors. This one performed really well at the Plantpeddler Trials in Iowa. There’s also some double-flowered ones, which I don’t particularly think are attractive. The color clash is kind of shocking, and the flower form is kind of funky. They’re a little better when they’re single color, I think, but that’s my opinion. Again, these are gonna be heat and drought tolerant, very similar to the habit of the other colors in the series.

Proven Winners also has the Mojave series. This is a shot from the Verona trial, so you can see they’re out there. They’re looking good, we got fuchsia. We got mango, we got pink, we got red tangerine. We got yellow. And those fonts look like they scooched over a little bit. So tangerine should go a little towards yellow. So these were all good. Performed quite well overall in the trials. Not as wide a color range as the other two series I just mentioned.

There’s also a Cupcake series from Dmmen, which did not appreciate the trial’s conditions as much as some of the other varieties, but this is a much smaller habit. This is a compact habit. Would be better in a container, or if you wanted a massed effect, plant more of them closer together.

Okay, Rudbeckia hirta. I told you I loved Rudbeckias. These are vegetatively propagated Rudbeckias, which, when the vegetatively propagated Rudbeckias first came to the market, I was like, “Really? Do we need this?” The answer is these are really good. They flower all season long. They have large flowers. There’s a series with fairly uniform habits. Pollinators love ’em. This one is produced from tissue culture. The Bull Plant Genetics. The Sunbeckia series. These are about 14 to 16 inches tall and there are 13 total varieties. I’ll run through a few of the more unusual colors.

This is Graffiti Peach, which is a semi-double flower. Sometimes semi-double flowers in the trade will be called double flowers, and we’re told, don’t plant double-flowered varieties if you want pollinators. These are semi-double, so they still have pollen-producing and nectar-producing structures. So they are okay for pollinators. We have Graffiti Caramel, which is a nice red and yellow bicolor. We’ve got Graffiti Cherry, which is kind of that subtle light yellow or dark cream with red, which is pretty cool and a pretty unique color in Rudbeckia hirtas.

We also have some breeding from a company out of Pennsylvania called Garden Genetics. Rising Sun Chestnut Gold. The previous, the Sunbeckias were produced from tissue culture. So that’s a high-tech laboratory propagation under sterile techniques and growing on agar. It’s fascinating, and I could talk for a long time about it, but I will spare you that. This is produced from unrooted cuttings, so it’s much easier to grow a stock plant in a way that keeps it from flowering. And then you take cuttings and you ship them to growers and they root them. Boom.

This one has particularly long-lasting flowers. Individual flowers will last on a plant for five to six weeks, which is pretty cool. Potentially, this could be a really good cut-flower variety for a shorter cut as well. It’s only about 18 to 24 inches tall. And it is day neutral, which is important to the professional crowd. If you want to have a Rudbeckia in bloom in the garden center in mid-May, a day-neutral variety is gonna be helpful because you don’t need to mess around with extending the photoperiod in your greenhouse to get it to flower, so that’s helpful to the professional market.

I want to talk about some Salvia farinaceas for a little bit. Historically, these were seed propagated and there were a number of good varieties. But now a number of breeders have come up with vegetative types that expand the color range. These are all good pollinator plants. The species itself is native to North America, but it’s a Southwestern and Texas native. Heat and drought tolerant, deer resistant, good pollinator plants. Even the vegetative selections are. The Icon Violet is from Dmmen. And this guy is about 18 to 22 inches by 12 to 16 inches wide, so it’s gonna be more of an upright. These individual flowers can make, or individual stems, can make decent cut flowers. And I’ve noticed in the trial gardens this year that a lot of the bicolor varieties were really, really attractive to bumblebees, which is cool to see.

So Icon Blue Bicolor. Cathedral from Green Fuse, similar. It would probably be hard to tell some of these apart if they were planted side by side unless they were labeled, even for a professional. Sometimes you get– This is Sky Blue, a nice light, and then we get Cathedral Shining Sea. Is that different enough to justify developing a new variety for market? They thought so. So these are, these are nice. There’s lots of different types. I wouldn’t be too uptight about whose breeding it is. If you like the color, get it. They’re gonna perform very, very similarly.

And then I want to talk a little bit about one of my favorite monarch butterfly plants, Tithonia. How many monarch butterflies can you get in one picture? My record is five. Not on this plant; that’s on Zinnia, which we’ll talk a bit in a little bit. The straight species is a great plant. It grows, like, four to six feet tall. It’s, uh… It’s a monarch food plant when they’ve migrated back to where they go, right? So they’re really used to it. It’s a very attractive, daisy-like flower. There is a variety from 2000 which was an All-America Selection winner called Fiesta del Sol that grows only two to three feet tall. So it’s much more manageable.

Now, the tall ones, when they’re growing in, say, mid-June, you can shear ’em back about a third and that’ll promote branching and keep ’em down a little bit. But they’re still tall. Fiesta del Sol had some production problems and it went away. It was not available. It is now back on the market, and it’s a good variety and you should check it out. Monarchs love this plant.

Okay, Verbena bonariensis. This is a 2002 All-American Selection winner called Vanity. Historically, this would grow really tall, one stem with kind of a neat flower on it, but it was a little bit wild and weedy for the garden. Breeding has resulted in shorter plants. This is about 30 inches tall and it’s more branched. So there’s more flowers per plant. This is heat tolerant. It is a really good container plant. It makes a good cut flower. You can grow it in the landscape as well. Vanity, there’s other varieties. Finesse from Benary is a little taller. Lollipop was a vegetative selection from Aris that grows about two feet. Proven Winners has one. So if you see a Verbena bonariensis out there, you know, even if it’s not Vanity, it could be a good one to check out. And Vanity, you can get from seed. And it’s not hard to grow.

Okay, zinnias, I love zinnias. I could do an hour on zinnias. I won’t do an hour on zinnias today. This is Queeny Lemon Peach, which is kind of a unique two-tone bicolor. It was a regional All-America Selection winner in 2022. This is Swiss breeding that is distributed by Floragran. And this is from seed, and it’s commonly available. Makes a really good cut flower. A lot of the specialty cut flower growers are using this as an option to expand their range.

And believe it or not, the last slide. At least the last slide with plant pictures. This is Zinnia marylandica Zydeco Fire. The marylandica types are interspecific hybrids so that they have more of a compact, semi-spreading habit. This is a very large flowered one with a nice semi-double to almost double flower, heat and drought tolerant. Grows about 20 inches tall, long blooming. The marylandicas generally are gonna be quite disease resistant to a lot of the foliar problems that some zinnias can sometimes have.

And with that, I think we have some time for some questions.

[audience applauding]