Double Play Spirea: More Than Just Pretty Flowers

As a general rule, Spiraea is known as a hardy, adaptable and attractive ornamental shrub. And of the 90 different Spiraea species, few are as colorful and useful as Spiraea japonica. The species is very hardy, adaptable and offers a wide range of flower and foliage colors. Add to this the ability to cross with other species and you have an array of breeding opportunities. With Spiraea, as well as other species, observation and imagination are the first steps in plant breeding, so looking for and noticing things that others may miss, brings new opportunities.

One of our early discoveries was a rich, pink flowered Spiraea fritschiana that we named Pink Parasols® (‘Wilma’). Known for its excellent hardiness and attractive autumn foliage, Spiraea fritschiana is a low mounded, Korean native, with large, attractive blooms that are normally pure white. By pure luck I found this pink flowered anomaly in a batch of seedlings at a local university. The seed source of this plant originated in Korea and I suspect it might have been an accidental hybrid with Spiraea japonica. Pink Parasols is a low mounded plant that is much wider than it is tall, making it an excellent commercial landscape plant. 

Another observation we made early on was that most spirea are sold in the spring, well before the flowers appear. This means that the color, texture and health of the foliage is how most consumers judge the plants they are buying. Further observation revealed that some seedlings had especially good, colorful foliage when leafing out in the spring. Such was the case when we crossed Pink Parasols Spiraea fritschiana with a yellow leafed Spiraea japonica variety and came up with a number of unique, colorful hybrids. After evaluating the top selections, we introduced one and named it Double Play Big Bang® (Spiraea x ‘Tracy’). The spring flush of foliage is a vibrant orange. As the foliage matures it turns bright yellow with contrasting red new growth. The pink flowers are extra-large, getting this trait from Spiraea fritschiana. The plant cultivar was named in honor of my wife Tracy, and has proven itself to be first class garden and landscape plant. Thank goodness for that, because you don’t want to name a bad plant after your wife!

Double Play Big Bang

It is amazing to note the difference in flowering between cultivars as well as seedlings. Some plants only flower in top while others flower from top to bottom. The corymb (bloom) diameter varies greatly between plants. The green-leafed varieties, Double Play Pink (Spiraea j. ‘SMNSJMFP’) and Double Play Artisan® (Spiraea j. ‘Galen’) were all selected for large corymbs and bloom density from top to bottom having pink and purple flowers respectively. Both cultivars are especially attractive in early spring as the new foliage emerges burgundy-red.  

Trialing is one of the most important parts of plant breeding. Double Play Artisan stands out from the crowd

Double Play Red® (Spiraea j. ‘SMNSJMFR’) has beautiful cherry-red spring foliage, but is was primarily selected for its uniquely colored, sangria-red flowers. It is the truest red I have ever seen in a Spirea; better than ‘Dart’s Red’, and far better than ‘Anthony Waterer’.  As the flowers age, the dark red hues do transition to pink, so there are times when the flowers will look more pink than red. Regardless, it is a truly unique and beautiful plant. 

Double Play Red (on the right) is the first true red spirea

Many gold-leaved cultivars being grown in the nursery trade are susceptible to powdery mildew (Podosphaera spiraeae). Double Play® Gold was introduced as a solution to this problem. Double Play Gold (Spiraea j. ‘Yan’) is a compact, dwarf, gold foliaged plant adorned with bright, bubblegum pink flowers. 

Double Play Gold

While most of the plants in the Double Play series were developed by Spring Meadow in our internal breeding program, two varieties were developed by North Carolina State University. A number of years ago, we had funded Dr. Thomas Ranney’s plant breeding team to develop sterile cultivars of potentially invasive plants. 

One of the common methods for sterile varieties is to create a triploid (3x) plant which has three sets of chromosomes instead of the normal two, a diploid (2x). This was the technique used to create seedless watermelons. The process starts by treating young seedlings with colchicine or oryzalin, which doubles the chromosomes, thus creating a tetraploid (4x) plant. The tetraploid plant is then crossed back with a normal diploid plant. The resulting triploid seedlings are often seedless. Double Play Doozie® (Spiraea japonica ‘NCSX2’) is a seedless triploid, as well as a wide cross containing genes of more than one species. One of the added benefits of seedless plants is that they put their energy into flowering instead of setting seed. With Double Play Doozie Spiraea, this results in a spirea that flowers all summer long. 

Double Play Doozie spring foliage

Double Play Doozie the first ever continuous blooming spirea

This plant is a game changer in the landscape market because it is so easy to grow and because it looks just as good in flower in August as it does in June when it first flowers. There is no need to shear it to get it to rebloom. The new growth continues to produce flower buds and flowers that cover and hid the older flower heads. The flowers are a vivid dark pink making it the perfect plant to replace ‘Anthony Waterer’ a variety that should have been discontinued year ago because it is a virus infected cultivar.  

Double Play Candy Corn® (Spiraea japonica ‘NCSX1’), is another Tom Ranney triploid hybrid, but it is not noted for being a rebloomer. This plant variety was selected for its unique colorful foliage. In the spring the first flush of foliage emerges a fiery orange-red. As spring progresses, the foliage color changes to a bright yellow and then eventually to a butter yellow, while constantly being accentuated with bright reddish-orange hues in the new growth. The color combination is quite unique and pleasing. The name Candy Corn, pays tribute to a sickeningly sweet, American, Halloween candy noted for its bright orange and yellow colors. 

The foliage transition of Double Play Candy Corn 

There is one more spirea in the Double Play series that is not a Spiraea japonica, but rather a selection of Spiraea media, a species that is native to Eastern Europe. A number of years back we use to grow and sell a Darthauzer nurseries variety named Snowstorm™ (Spiraea media 'Darsnorm'). After three or four generations of inbreeding and selection we singled out a dwarf plant with notable blue foliage. We introduced it with the name Double Play Blue Kazoo (Spiraea media ‘SMSMBK’) a silly, but memorable name based on the silly children’s musical instrument. I love plants with colorful foliage and especially blue foliage and I believe this is a special plant. It is a low mounded, beauty with waxy, blue-green foliage that is randomly air-brushed with a cast of purple hues. The large, white, spring blooms contrast wonderfully with the richly colored foliage. Like all spirea, it looks best when planted en masse.

Double Play Blue Kazoo foliage

Blue Kazoo planting in bloom

It is a bit humorous looking back, because so many people told us we were wasting our time breeding Spiraea. They said, “Who needs another spirea?” But like all plant breeding, there is always room for new plants, if they are improvements. Growers continue to look for plants that finish faster and that have fewer production inputs. Retailers, with a limited number of salespeople, are looking for plants with greater impulse appeal, which will sell themselves. Consumers want shrubs that offer more than just two weeks of flowers. They are looking for reliable plants that earn their keep all season long and these new spirea do just that.

  

Get more information on each of the Double Play varieties here        

The Trials and Tribulations of Plant Evaluation

Most all of these roses will be thrown out.

Please don't tell this to my rose breeders, but part of my responsibility as a plant hunter is to throw away roses; as many as possible, and as soon as possible.  You see, trialing plants is an expensive business.  It takes a lot of greenhouse space, a lot of land, and a lot of labor.  But if you want to introduce the best rose (or other shrub variety), you have no choice. You have to do it. Just take a look at all the beautiful roses in this picture. Some of you would say, "I'd love to have any of those plants in my garden!" but that's not quite true.  You would be happy if I gave you these roses to you for free, but you would not be happy paying your hard-earned-money for most of these roses. Trust me, that's why we throw them away. 

Roses may be pretty, but they're also a pretty tough business.  Currently, one rose dominates the marketplace. Growers, garden centers, and yes, even consumers are content with one rose, even if there are others just as good (and there are).  Having one dominant rose simplifies life, because you don't have to think and you don't have to choose. Don't argue with me on this, because I know it's true: people vote every spring with their dollars and for the last fifteen years the vote has been for one rose.

The only hope to successfully introduce a new rose is to work with multiple rose breeders, to test and trial a lot of potential new varieties, and after three or four years of trialing, throw the vast majority out. The idea is to sift through the chaff to find the very best plants. We start the process by growing the roses in containers in a greenhouse. We never spray them with fungicides. We over-head water them each day, and keep them in the same container for 2-3 years until they're so stressed that they succumb to disease. Most roses do. In addition, we plant them our in a trial garden following the same protocols and let Darwinism takes over. Survival of the fittest. After twenty years and hundreds upon hundreds of rose selections on the trash heap, we have introduced only sixteen rose varieties under the Proven Winners brand. They have won six prestigious awards.

This is pretty much the same process that we go through for all the Spiraea, Hydrangea, Syringa (lilacs) and every other species of shrub that we trial.  

Someone has to document and analyse the trial data so we can get to the best plant. We have a team of six people that help to evaluate plants and decide what gets introduced.

We evaluate them in greenhouses to make sure they'll perform well for the nurseries that buy and grow our plants. We have to find out how fast  it finishes in a one and three gallon pots, and determine how it looks in the spring when our customers do their shipping to garden centers. How does it present in the container? Does it get mildew? Does it grow too fast or does it grow too slow? How often does it need to be pruned and will it hold up its flowers? 

This Spiraea evaluation is about more than just judging the flowers.

The Double Play® series is noted for beautiful flowers and foliage. Double Play Big Bang has become an industry favorite because of its unique orange foliage and large flower size. 

Will it be in bud or bloom in the spring when people shop for plants? If not, does it have interesting foliage that make it showy enough to grab your attention amongst all the other spirea? I bet you didn't know we were so critical of our plants!

Many of these Spiraea seedlings are beautiful, but nearly all will be discarded.
Our late nursery dog Zoe (RIP) loved evaluating seedling plants. The job now belongs to Rosie.

Breeders have traditionally bred for better flowers; Why not? People love flowers. 

Breeding starts with a question or an idea. What would make for a better spirea? Traditionally plant breeders have been obsessed with flowers and understandably so. New colors and bigger is better have been the drumbeat most often followed. People love flowers and so yes, of course we need to breed for flowers, but there has to be more. A beautiful woman (or man) with nasty disposition is not all that attractive and the same is true for plants. We want our plants to be pleasant, agreeable, and low maintenance. That means we have to test and trial a plant, a process that can take ten years or more. 

Each row represents a unique selection that is evaluated for form, sunburn resistance, growth rate, foliage color and length of bloom. The new plants are compared against best plants on the market

Believe it or not, just thirty years ago, shrubs were not grown in containers. They were grown in a field, dug while dormant in early spring, and sold as bare-root (without soil) or balled and burlapped.  It never mattered if a plant looked good in a container. It never mattered if a shrub was dwarf or compact; in fact, the faster it grew, the better.  All this has changed and so has plant breeding, plant hunting, and plant introduction.  We have to consider all these things and more. Someone has to document and keep track of all this information.  We might have to evaluate thirty five potential spireas just to find one plant worthy of introduction. And it will have to have beautiful flowers and beautiful foliage, as well as superior hardiness and heat tolerance.  People are no longer content with plants like forsythia and mock orange that flower for two weeks and grow fifteen feet tall. Every inch in a consumer's yard and garden is valuable space and they want their plants to look good in the spring, summer and fall. That means we have evaluate our shrubs in the spring, summer and fall for season-long interest.   

Evaluations take place from spring through fall to document all the seasons of color.

Some things are easy to test for, like powdery mildew on dark-leaved Physocarpus (ninebark). We have been breeding and trialing dark ninebark for over fifteen years and have only introduced five plants out of thousands. Just as black spot has been the question mark on roses, "To mildew or not to mildew, that is the question" with ninebark. I'm often happy to find diseases on plants, so long as it's early in the evaluation process. It is an easy reason to narrow the field and hone in on the best plants.

Greenhouse container trials help us weed out the weaker plants. Ninebark, Spiraea, Syringa, hydrangea
and Rosa are all susceptible to mildew. It's easy to spot on dark leaves. Note the clean selection to the right.  

At Spring Meadow, we begin the process by throwing away plants in our seedling test field. We walk our fields regularly with a can of orange paint, and if a seedling is diseased, weak, floppy, or no better than the best plant we sell, we mark it with neon orange paint. Within days, they're dug up and gone, and after two or three years, you are down to just a few very good plants. If we're lucky, one plant will stand alone and we'll have a potential new introduction. 

The original Fire Light® Hydrangea in our breeding field. Note all the open
 space where lesser plants were removed. Clearly, the best plant remained.

Spring Meadow President Dale Deppe stands next to the original Scent and Sensibility lilac
in our breeding field. Again, note the open space in the field.

You would think this was the happy ending, but it's not. We will then propagate thirty to a hundred plants from the original mother plant for further evaluation. In addition to container trials, we plant some back to the test field and some to our trial garden. The work has only just begun. Once you root cuttings of a plant, there is no guarantee that the new plants will grow and behave like the original seedling; sometimes they grow slower and other times faster. Some plants are too difficult to root and never make it past this stage. More importantly, we have to determine if the plant is actually better than its potential competition. Sometimes that's obvious. The three hydrangeas below are good examples.

Fire Light® hydrangea stood out against all the other plants on the market

Bobo® hydrangea was a clear winner in our field and container trials.

Other times it takes a few years to sort things out, like with the caryopteris below. There used to be two selections in this row, but the one the foreground was killed after two hard winters. In this case, winter made the final decision for us and we now have a very hardy selection.   

Sunshine Blue® II was a dramatic improvement in hardiness over the original. 

Trialing and testing new plants is very crucial if you are selling plants under a brand as we do. Branding is more than just a pot and tag; it is more than advertising and marketing. Branding is the relationship we have with customers. And like most relationships, it all comes down to trust. Our brand relationship is on the line every time someone buys one of our plants. People are either going to have a good experience or a bad experience, either of which they will associate with the brand, so we do everything possible to make sure it's a good experience. It not always easy because we're selling live, perishable products. 

Good brands know that the product testing and improvement does not stop after the product launch.  We have to continue to improve upon what we've introduced, even if it's never even noticed.  A few years ago we introduced a new dwarf Buddleia (butterfly bush) called Lo & Behold® 'Blue Chip Jr.' The goal is to replace 'Blue Chip' with a better plant, because our growers wanted a smaller, less brittle plant that bloomed earlier and longer. Over the years we have added to this line, improving the colors, the habits, and the bloom time. The Caryopteris I wrote about earlier is another example of continual improvement. Sunshine Blue® was a very good plant that sold well, but we replaced it with something better. 

We have moved up the bloom time with each introduction in this series of dwarf butterfly bush.
The original 'Blue Chip' (on the far left) is far from blooming in this trial.

Creating a full and vibrant color range for the Lo & Behold® series was important.
These seedless, non-invasive have won numerous awards for innovation.  

Hydrangea 2.0: Invincibelle® Spirit II being discussed in our test field

Perhaps one of the more dramatic product improvements in our brand has been been with Invincibelle® Spirit hydrangea. Last year we issued an update on this plant that has strong stems, a more compact habit, and richer flower color. There is no such thing as a perfect plant and we have introduced some plants that came short of the mark, and so we have get back to work and make it better. The first iPhone was not perfect and certainly Apple will improve upon the iPhone 6. It's a pain to change, but everyone respects their leadership, innovation, and their relentless quest for improvement.  Their products continue to delight people worldwide. There are people that complain we introduce too many plants, and I sympathize, but we must keep improving if we are to remain relevant. We must continue to come up with a better roses, better hydrangeas, and every other shrub type. If we fail to delight our customers, they will vote with their hard-earned money and spend it on other things that will delight them. 

A new, continuous blooming, carefree, fragrant rose. At Last is available on a limited basis from Better Homes and Gardens). The 2016 National Champion of Shrub Madness.  

Rigorously trialing plants is hard work and time consuming, but it is also rewarding. A good example is the At Last™ rose seen above. It was one of the few roses that proved itself in our trials. It rose to the top because of its superb disease resistance and ability to continuously bloom all season long. To make things even better, it has a rich spicy fragrance until now never found in a high-end, disease resistant rose.  To gain even greater confidence in the rose, we have given out over 40,000 plants to our top growers this spring. The roses were given out with only one condition: that that they cannot sell them. They are to be given away to garden writers, bloggers, garden center retailers, landscape designers, and botanical gardens to be trialed and tested across North America. It is the first plant to be tested so rigorously, and we want to have the highest level of confidence before we release it to the general public. If you were included on the list above, contact Spring Meadow Nursery to request a plant. If you were not included on the list but still want to trial this rose, there are a limited number of plants available for purchase from Better Homes and Gardens.    

     

A Peak Into the Future

One of the fun things about working at a wholesale, liner (starter plant) nursery is that you get to see into the future. That's because the new plant varieties we sell today don't hit retail stores until after our customer's grow them a year or two into larger retail-sized plants. So when I analyse our current orders, I get a glimpse of what will be in garden centers in a year or two. 

Would you like to see into the future? Here is a top ten countdown of our top selling new plants. Click on the picture if you want to learn more about the plant.

Kodiak™ Orange Diervilla

Infinitini™ Brite Pink Crape Myrtle

Double Play® Red Spirea

Let's Dance® Rave Hydrangea 

Brass Buckle™ Japanese Holly

Invincibelle® Spirit II

Zinfin Doll™ Hydrangea paniculata

Lo & Behold® 'Blue Chip Jr' Buddleia

Little Quick Fire® Hydrangea paniculata

Bloomerang® Dark Purple Lilac

Freaky Foliage A-Z (part 3)

Here is the last installment in my Freaky Foliage photographic series. Those of you that know me or follow me regularly know that i'm a plant geek and foliage freak.That's because flowers, while pretty, are fleeting, so think foliage and form first. Start with attractive foliage and your garden will look great all season long. 

I love hearing your comments, so let me know which foliage plants you like best.

Pinus parvaflora 'Ogon Janome'

Fine Line - Rhamnus frangula

Fine Line - Rhamnus frangula - close up

Bollywood Azalea (Rhododendron) 

Salix helvetica 'Ober Donau'

Glow Girl Spirea - Spiraea betulifolia

Thuja occidentalis 'Linesville' (AKA Bowling Ball)

Anna's Magic Ball Thuja

Ulmus x holladica 'Wredei'

All that Glows Viburnum 

Trial Garden Update

Every picture tells a story, so today's post is photographic journal of what is looking good in our trial garden. Our test garden is a fantastic resource for our nursery. It is a big investment to maintain such a large garden, but It allows us to test new plants and compare them to older cultivars.

It is here that we learn about a plants traits, both the good and bad, and determine if a plant is good enough to be introduced. Here is a sampling of plants that caught my eye over the last few weeks. What do you like and why?  

Calycanthus 'Aphrodite'

Festivus Gold a new compact ninebark from the Netherlands with bright gold foliage

Black Lace Elderberry is at its best when you let it grow big

Golden Glitter new variegated selection of Halward's Silver dwarf spirea. Every inch is covered with flowers.

Summer Wine Ninebark is wide, cascading shrub that flowers all along the stems.

Spilled Wine Weigela continues to impress visitors.  

Happy Face White Potentilla flowers earlier and heavier than other selections

Oso happy Smoothie is thornless shrub rose. It's a personal favorite. Very hardy. Very floriferous.   

Glow Girl Spirea is as neat as a pin without pruning. Great flowers, foliage, form and fall color.