An Echinacea by any other color

  E. 'Pink Double Delight'

For the last couple of gardening seasons, the humble Echinacea purpurea, purple coneflower, has sported a whole new hue.  Make that several new hues.  Through genetic tinkering and tissue culture, hybridizers took the gentle Echinacea spp. and turned them upside down.  Garden centers are full of echinaceas in bright orange, red, pink, yellow, and even green.  Some sport double flowers and pom poms making them look very little like their forebears.

Do you ever wonder where these plants come from?  When you buy your plants in the garden center, read the tags which, because of plant trademarks, often now sport a name with a ™ or an ® associated with a particular hybridizer, or the nursery who promotes his or her plants.  With this information and a little online research, you can spot which hybridizer created your favorite plant.

For example, the Big Sky™ series of echinaceas are hybrids of Richard Saul of ItSaul Plants in Atlanta, Georgia. Saul worked ten years crossing the classic E. purpurea with the yellow E. paradoxa, native to Missouri and Arkansas, to create new flower colors.  He succeeded. With E. ‘Katie Saul’ sold as Summer Sky, ‘Evan Saul’ known as Sundown, and ‘Twilight’, he not only changed the coneflowers’ good looks, but he also altered the way other hybridizers viewed them.

Because hybridizers work feverishly to change plants and bring something consistently new to the marketplace, they protect their plants via patent (since the 1930s in the U.S.) and now trademark.  Although trademarking plant names is somewhat controversial and also difficult for garden writers, hybridizers maintain that they must protect their investment. That's why many new, hybrids sport more than one name, one being the botanical name, and the other a trademarked name that is much more catchy.  Confused yet?

Echinaceas are the current “It” plants with hybridizers, but will they also be with Oklahoma gardeners?  It depends on whether they will grow and bloom abundantly like their ancestors.

Last spring, Terra Nova Nurseries released two, new, vibrantly colored echinaceas, ‘Tomato Soup’ and ‘Mac ‘n Cheese’.  For 2010, they are introducing many more including: ‘Coral Reef’, ‘Firebird’, ‘Hot Lava’, ‘Flame Thrower’, 'Tangerine Dream’ and ‘Maui Sunshine’.  From this extensive list, you can tell echinaceas are hot, and Terra Nova is hoping you’ll invest in a lot of them.

How well these new varieties will do in Oklahoma remains to be seen, but no one can deny that the colors are vibrant.   One piece of advice from Dan Heims of Terra Nova, about some of the newer varieties (especially the yellow ones), is to cut off the first set of blooms on the plants, giving the roots time to develop basal shoots.  Otherwise, he said, the plants bloom themselves to death.  I tried this with some of my newer plants like E. ‘Pink Double Delight’ which has flourished in my garden for two seasons.  Its cheerful, double flowers look great next to Artemisia ludoviciana ‘Silver King’.    ‘Pink Double Delight’ is part of the Cone-fections® series which also includes ‘Coconut Lime’ (a personal favorite), ‘Hot Papaya’, ‘Meringue’and ‘Milkshake’.  All of these cultivars are fully double giving them a frilly appearance.  They were hybridized by Henk Holtmaat and Arie Blom of AB-Cultivars of the Netherlands.

E. Pixie Meadowbrite™, an extremely floriferous selection from Dr. James R. Ault of the Chicago Botanic Garden, is bright pink and, at 24 to 30 inches, is shorter than many selections.

The list of new cultivars goes on and on, and gardeners can now find echinaceas in nearly every shape, size and color imaginable, but let’s not forget native coneflowers too like E. pallida, which has delicate, reflexed petals of airy lavender.  There’s still a place in the garden for native coneflowers and those which aren’t the color of mom’s tomato soup.