I honestly have no idea how the average gardener (of course all of you, dear readers, are way, way above average gardeners!) keeps track of the annual tidal wave of new plants to hit the market every year.
I mean, seriously. With almost 90,000 registered daylily varieties, thousands of hosta varieties and what seems like a billion new purple cone flower (Echinacea species and hybrids) forms out there, keeping track each year is a bit like drinking from the proverbial fire hose.
A number of years ago I published a book on dogwoods along with a nurseryman friend from Tennessee. We spent several years researching, searching databases, emailing with friends around the globe and eventually came up with what we considered to be a pretty exhaustive list of dogwood species and cultivars.
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We dutifully submitted our manuscript and went about our daily business, waiting for arrival for the first printed copy. When that copy arrived, and just to satisfy my own curious nature, I got online and spent a few hours looking for what I assumed to be the two or three new forms that were introduced during the six-month printing and shipping process. To my dismay no fewer than 90 new forms had been named, introduced, patented and/or trademarked — in just those sixmonths! Talk about a fire hose ...
Fortunately, there are resources out there to provide gardeners with some guidance. The sources are wide and varied in both accuracy and usefulness. For instance, you can go to the American Hemerocallis (daylily) Society’s website to find a searchable database of all the registered varieties complete with breeder, description, photo and more. You can even find info on ‘Yew Dell Garden Party,’a variety registered (2016) in honor of Yew Dell on the occasion of the AHS national convention in Louisville.
But as useful as the daylily resource is — and for us plant dorks out there it is hugely useful — it isn’t the kind of resource you can casually peruse to find a recommendation for a specific form for your specific garden. It’s just way too much information. And even if you do find one there that you like, there’s the little issue of finding someone growing the onein a 90,000 match!
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On the opposite side of the spectrum there’s the Perennial Plant Association . Founded as an industry/trade organization in 1984 by an Ohio State University horticulture professor and a few nursery owners, it has become the go-to source for plant conferences, training workshops and all sorts of information on herbaceous perennial garden plants.
Among the PPA’s most useful information when it comes to the more casual gardener is their Perennial Plant of the Year program. Each year since 1990, the PPA has announced its single annual award winner. And an anointing of such a plant can make for a Cinderella story for any plant. This year’s award winner, Allium ‘Millenium’ (an ornamental onion) was a relatively obscure plant a year or two ago. Now it’s the LeBron James of the garden plant world.
But the list, starting back in 1990 and including a single entry per year through 2018, is a treasure trove of garden recommendations. The PPA’s website lists detailed descriptions, production and growing information and photos for each awarded plant. If one was starting off in the perennial gardening world, this would be a great place to start.
Closer to home, the Theodore Klein Plant Awards program has been handing out a similar award since 1999. A collaboration of the University of Kentucky Landscape and Nursery program, Yew Dell Botanical Gardens and the Kentucky Nursery and Landscape association, a poorly behaved committee of plant experts calmly debates a list each year, hurls insults and one another and eventually comes up with the consensus list for each year; four to six plants per year — trees, shrubs, groundcovers, vines, perennials — essentially every category of ornamentals other than annuals.
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There’s about a million other sources out there but these are a few that can hopefully reduce that fire hose of information to a more manageable drip-irrigation flow.
Yew Dell Botanical Gardens, 6220 Old Lagrange Road, yewdellgardens.org.
