How Shrubs are Made
The average person has no idea where the plants at their local garden center come from. When I tell people that I work at a nursery they think that I mow lawns or sell flats of marigolds, and that I take long winter vacations in Florida. Recently, the folks at GardenAnswer came out to Spring Meadow and made a video that explains how a shrub is made from beginning to end. Laura is so authentic and does such a great job of explaining the process. Share this video with your friends on Facebook so that they realize how much goes into producing the plants they see at retail. They should find it fascinating, because it is fascinating!
The Trials and Tribulations of Plant Evaluation
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| 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.
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| 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?
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| This Spiraea evaluation is about more than just judging the flowers. |
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| 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!
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| 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. |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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Evaluations take place from spring through fall to document all the seasons of color.
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| 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.
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| The original Fire Light® Hydrangea in our breeding field. Note all the open space where lesser plants were removed. Clearly, the best plant remained. |
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| 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.
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| Fire Light® hydrangea stood out against all the other plants on the market |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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. |
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| Creating a full and vibrant color range for the Lo & Behold® series was important. These seedless, non-invasive have won numerous awards for innovation. |
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| 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.
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| 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. |
Every Plant Tells a Story
They say that every picture tells a story, but it's also true that every new plant has a story. They have a birthday, one or two parents (depending if the plant is a sport mutation or a seedling). Every plant has a journey to market (or not) that is often filled with trials and tribulations. And some have happy endings and make it to a consumers yard. Here are a few happy stories.
This barberry was born at Spring Meadow Nursery about 13 years ago. The goal was to create a replacement for 'Crimson Pygmy' barberry, which often reverts to a larger plant. It's common in the nursery business to blame a nursery for mixing up their 'Crimson Pygmy' with a larger form, but it's not a mix-up: it's a whole plant mutation that I have been told may result from a jumping gene. For some reason the switch gets flipped and you get a big 'Crimson Pygmy.' After a long selection process, propagation, field testing, wheat rust testing and getting the results published in the congressional record as a wheat rust resistant variety, the first Sunjoy® Mini Salsa was sold in spring of 2012 and is now common in the garden trade.
Lo & Behold® 'Purple Haze' is a different duck than all the other Lo & Behold Buddleia. Developed by Denny Werner of NCSU, this hybrid selection is a low, wide-spreading variety that makes it a great selection for use as a ground cover or in a decorative container. Like all of the Lo & Behold® series, we had to test it for sterility. It passed the test and can now be sold in Oregon where other Buddleia are banned.
When the world-renown clematis breeder Szczepan Marczynski told me he had what amounts to a sweet autumn clematis with red flowers that change to purple and that blooms months earlier, I was all in. The fragrance of sweet autumn clematis is as good as any plant in existence, and the same goes this beauty. Most Clematis can be tricky to grow, with brittle stems that break if you so much as look at them, but this plant is super sturdy and grows like a dream. Anyone can be successful growing this variety. It's as close to perfection as a plant can be.
The plant in this picture is a three year old plant in our test garden. The first year you plant it, it does not do much besides grow roots. The next year it takes off, however, it is much more restrained than sweet autumn clematis and does not litter the garden with unwanted seedlings. This plant has what it takes to be the best-selling clematis of all time, you can mark my words. It won a DGA Green Thumb award for the best new plant of 2014 and I expect it to earn many more awards and accolades as people get to know it.
If you read my blog, then you already know Dr. Roderick Woods. The plant he is holding is Blue Chiffon™. This plant just blows me away. All his plants in the Chiffon™ series blow me away. Just look at the picture below, which I took at the nursery this summer:
The Chiffon™ Hibiscus are the heaviest blooming rose of Sharon you will find, and Blue Chiffon is the clearest blue color ever. I was never a big rose of Sharon fan until I started growing the Chiffon series and now I'm a believer. This series comes in blue, white, lavender and pink. If you want to read the full story behind these plants and the fascinating man that created them follow this link.
I'm a bit biased when it comes to Paraplu® Hydrangea because it is a plant that I developed. It was a total accident that came out of a breeding project to develop variegated flowered hydrangeas. All of the plants in this particular cross had doubled florets and thick plastic-like leaves, but none of the seedlings had variegated flowers. This plant was the best of the lot so we introduced it. Paraplu is typically a bright pink but can be easily turned to a rich purple by treating it with aluminum sulfate. Sometimes, mistakes can make for great plants.
Tiny Tuff Stuff™ is another plant out of our breeding program here at Spring Meadow. I love Hydrangea serrata because they are so bud hardy and bloom reliably. Again, I got lucky when I discovered that this plant is a rebloomer. It has smaller, narrower leaves and an abundance of dainty flowers that cover the plant every summer. It has never failed to bloom here in our Michigan trial gardens.
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes, and that's how I feel about Bobo hydrangea. I had no idea how good this plant was until it spent a few years in our trialing program. I knew it was a good container plant, but I soon discovered it was an even more remarkable garden plant that simply glows in the landscape. It is compact and dwarf in habit, and the flowers cover every inch of the plant right down to the ground. I have no doubt this will be a very popular landscape plant. This plant comes from Johan Van Huylenbroeck, the same breeder that developed Pinky Winky® hydrangea.
I have already told the story of Invincibelle® Spirit Hydrangea, but the longer you grow a plant, the more you learn. What I've learned is that this plant is simply incredible once it has reached full maturity. This takes about 3 years, so be patient and you will be well rewarded. I've also learned that it needs to be grown in full sun to look its best. People think that hydrangeas are shade plants, and some are, but Hydrangea arborescens develops stronger stems and bigger, brighter flowers when grown in full sun.
Last year we introduced Invincibelle® Spirit II (Two) which will replace the original. This new improved "2.0" version has stronger stems, richer flower color and healthier foliage. We are all used to cell phones and computer software getting updates, but plants can get updated as well.
We work with about six different roses breeders, and we put all their roses through the gauntlet to find the very best varieties. In our trials, we spray no fungicides at all, and we overhead irrigate to actually encourage black spot and mildew. We test these roses in the greenhouse and in the garden and after three or four years, most of our test plants end up on the trash heap. Oso Easy® Double Red rose was one of the few varieties that passed the test and it came through with flying colors. Developed by noted rose breeder Alain Meilland of France, this rose is not only highly disease resistant, it is also prized for its perpetual blooming. Visitors to our test garden confirmed our opinions of this rose by picking it as one of their favorites. It has only been on the market for less than a year so be patient, it will be coming to a garden center near you very soon.
Year after year Oso Happy® Candy Oh! continues to amaze me. No diseases, an abundance of blooms and it always looks happy. No, it does not have massive, highly doubled flowers, but that should not matter. It is a great shrub that offers lots of color with little to no effort. You can read the back story on this rose here.
Commonly known as the chastetree, Vitex agnus-castus was in ancient times thought to be an anaphrodisiac. According to Wikipedia, the leaves and stems were once used in ladies' bedding to "cool the heat of lust" when the men were off to war, thus the name chastetree. I'm not so sure if this works or not, but I do know that it makes a wonderful landscape plant that is highly deer and drought resistant. Blue Diddley® Vitex makes the plant even better with its dwarf stature that is about half the size of typical vitex. In the north, zones 5-6, this plant acts like a perennial and dies back to the ground, but regrows and flowers much like a butterfly bush. It is slow to break bud in the spring, so do not panic if the plant looks dead, it will sprout new shoots and make a fine specimen in due time.
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| Sunjoy® Mini Salsa Barberry |
This barberry was born at Spring Meadow Nursery about 13 years ago. The goal was to create a replacement for 'Crimson Pygmy' barberry, which often reverts to a larger plant. It's common in the nursery business to blame a nursery for mixing up their 'Crimson Pygmy' with a larger form, but it's not a mix-up: it's a whole plant mutation that I have been told may result from a jumping gene. For some reason the switch gets flipped and you get a big 'Crimson Pygmy.' After a long selection process, propagation, field testing, wheat rust testing and getting the results published in the congressional record as a wheat rust resistant variety, the first Sunjoy® Mini Salsa was sold in spring of 2012 and is now common in the garden trade.
 |
| Lo & Behold® Purple Haze butterfly bush |
Lo & Behold® 'Purple Haze' is a different duck than all the other Lo & Behold Buddleia. Developed by Denny Werner of NCSU, this hybrid selection is a low, wide-spreading variety that makes it a great selection for use as a ground cover or in a decorative container. Like all of the Lo & Behold® series, we had to test it for sterility. It passed the test and can now be sold in Oregon where other Buddleia are banned.
 |
| Clematis 'Sweet Summer Love' |
When the world-renown clematis breeder Szczepan Marczynski told me he had what amounts to a sweet autumn clematis with red flowers that change to purple and that blooms months earlier, I was all in. The fragrance of sweet autumn clematis is as good as any plant in existence, and the same goes this beauty. Most Clematis can be tricky to grow, with brittle stems that break if you so much as look at them, but this plant is super sturdy and grows like a dream. Anyone can be successful growing this variety. It's as close to perfection as a plant can be.
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| Clematis 'Sweet Summer Love' |
The plant in this picture is a three year old plant in our test garden. The first year you plant it, it does not do much besides grow roots. The next year it takes off, however, it is much more restrained than sweet autumn clematis and does not litter the garden with unwanted seedlings. This plant has what it takes to be the best-selling clematis of all time, you can mark my words. It won a DGA Green Thumb award for the best new plant of 2014 and I expect it to earn many more awards and accolades as people get to know it.
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| Dr. Roderick Woods |
If you read my blog, then you already know Dr. Roderick Woods. The plant he is holding is Blue Chiffon™. This plant just blows me away. All his plants in the Chiffon™ series blow me away. Just look at the picture below, which I took at the nursery this summer:
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| Blue Chiffon™ rose of Sharon |
The Chiffon™ Hibiscus are the heaviest blooming rose of Sharon you will find, and Blue Chiffon is the clearest blue color ever. I was never a big rose of Sharon fan until I started growing the Chiffon series and now I'm a believer. This series comes in blue, white, lavender and pink. If you want to read the full story behind these plants and the fascinating man that created them follow this link.
 |
| Paraplu® Hydrangea macrophylla |
I'm a bit biased when it comes to Paraplu® Hydrangea because it is a plant that I developed. It was a total accident that came out of a breeding project to develop variegated flowered hydrangeas. All of the plants in this particular cross had doubled florets and thick plastic-like leaves, but none of the seedlings had variegated flowers. This plant was the best of the lot so we introduced it. Paraplu is typically a bright pink but can be easily turned to a rich purple by treating it with aluminum sulfate. Sometimes, mistakes can make for great plants.
 |
| Tiny Tuff Stuff™ Hydrangea serrata |
Tiny Tuff Stuff™ is another plant out of our breeding program here at Spring Meadow. I love Hydrangea serrata because they are so bud hardy and bloom reliably. Again, I got lucky when I discovered that this plant is a rebloomer. It has smaller, narrower leaves and an abundance of dainty flowers that cover the plant every summer. It has never failed to bloom here in our Michigan trial gardens.
 |
| Bobo® Hydrangea paniculata |
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes, and that's how I feel about Bobo hydrangea. I had no idea how good this plant was until it spent a few years in our trialing program. I knew it was a good container plant, but I soon discovered it was an even more remarkable garden plant that simply glows in the landscape. It is compact and dwarf in habit, and the flowers cover every inch of the plant right down to the ground. I have no doubt this will be a very popular landscape plant. This plant comes from Johan Van Huylenbroeck, the same breeder that developed Pinky Winky® hydrangea.
 |
| Invincibelle® Spirit Hydrangea arborescens |
I have already told the story of Invincibelle® Spirit Hydrangea, but the longer you grow a plant, the more you learn. What I've learned is that this plant is simply incredible once it has reached full maturity. This takes about 3 years, so be patient and you will be well rewarded. I've also learned that it needs to be grown in full sun to look its best. People think that hydrangeas are shade plants, and some are, but Hydrangea arborescens develops stronger stems and bigger, brighter flowers when grown in full sun.
Last year we introduced Invincibelle® Spirit II (Two) which will replace the original. This new improved "2.0" version has stronger stems, richer flower color and healthier foliage. We are all used to cell phones and computer software getting updates, but plants can get updated as well.
 |
| Oso Easy® Double Red Rose |
We work with about six different roses breeders, and we put all their roses through the gauntlet to find the very best varieties. In our trials, we spray no fungicides at all, and we overhead irrigate to actually encourage black spot and mildew. We test these roses in the greenhouse and in the garden and after three or four years, most of our test plants end up on the trash heap. Oso Easy® Double Red rose was one of the few varieties that passed the test and it came through with flying colors. Developed by noted rose breeder Alain Meilland of France, this rose is not only highly disease resistant, it is also prized for its perpetual blooming. Visitors to our test garden confirmed our opinions of this rose by picking it as one of their favorites. It has only been on the market for less than a year so be patient, it will be coming to a garden center near you very soon.
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| Oso Easy® Double red is the perfect flowering shrub for landscapes. Here a mass planting is providing a big splash of color in a park in Switzerland. |
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| Oso Happy® Candy Oh! Rose |
Year after year Oso Happy® Candy Oh! continues to amaze me. No diseases, an abundance of blooms and it always looks happy. No, it does not have massive, highly doubled flowers, but that should not matter. It is a great shrub that offers lots of color with little to no effort. You can read the back story on this rose here.
 |
| Blue Diddley® dwarf Vitex |
Commonly known as the chastetree, Vitex agnus-castus was in ancient times thought to be an anaphrodisiac. According to Wikipedia, the leaves and stems were once used in ladies' bedding to "cool the heat of lust" when the men were off to war, thus the name chastetree. I'm not so sure if this works or not, but I do know that it makes a wonderful landscape plant that is highly deer and drought resistant. Blue Diddley® Vitex makes the plant even better with its dwarf stature that is about half the size of typical vitex. In the north, zones 5-6, this plant acts like a perennial and dies back to the ground, but regrows and flowers much like a butterfly bush. It is slow to break bud in the spring, so do not panic if the plant looks dead, it will sprout new shoots and make a fine specimen in due time.
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