While the garden beds rest tucked under their covers of mulch, it’s a perfect time to sit by the fireside and entertain visions of next year’s plums, sweet peas and pear trees. To help you with your gardening resolutions for the new year, we checked in with some of the experts who graced these pages in 2003 and asked for their predictions and resolutions for the coming year.
Here are some of the most intriguing new plants we see for the 2004 gardening season. Look for them in catalogs or ask for them at garden centers:
Meadowbright coneflower (Echinacea `Art’s Pride’). Bred at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe and introduced through the Chicagoland Grows program, this is the first orange coneflower and one of the few that is fragrant, according to Nicholas Staddon, director of new plants for Monrovia, a major nationwide grower. A cross between yellow coneflower and purple coneflower, both native plants, it’s likely to handle Midwestern conditions well.
Endless Summer hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla `Bailmer’) from Bailey Nurseries is billed as reblooming right through the season, rather than just in early summer. It also is more hardy than earlier macrophylla varieties, handling temperatures down to Zone 4. It will grow to 3 to 5 feet high and wide, with mopheads of bloom up to 8 inches wide in the garden or up to 6 inches wide grown in containers.
The Generous Gardener rose (Rosa `Ausdrawn’). New to the U.S. from English breeder David Austin, this climber has fluffy blooms of palest shell-pink and is described as very winter-hardy, tough and reliable. It will grow to 5 feet high and 4 feet wide as a shrub or 8 feet wide and 10 feet high as a climber. Available exclusively from David Austin roses; for a catalog, call 800-328-8893 or see www.davidaustinroses.com/american/.
Flower Carpet Yellow ground cover rose (Rosa var. `Noalesa’). The sixth in the Australian firm Anthony Tesselaar International’s `Flower Carpet’ series of low-maintenance, low-growing, repeat-blooming shrub roses, it bears buttercup yellow semidouble blooms in clusters of five to six. Winter mulch is advised in Zone 6 and colder (including Chicago’s Zone 5).
Another new shrub rose is Blushing Knock Out (Rosa `Radyod’), a pale pink version of the tough, hardy, disease-resistant, repeat-blooming Wisconsin-born red `Knock Out’ rose from Star Roses. It gets to 3 feet high and 3 feet wide with a rounded habit and plentiful single blooms.
Tiger Eyes cutleaf staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina `Bailtiger’). This striking new cultivar of a native plant, also from Bailey Nurseries, has long stems with fringes of eye-popping chartreuse-to-yellow foliage. In fall, the foliage is yellow, orange and scarlet. It will grow 6 feet high and wide.
