The first day of spring, astronomically speaking, will arrive on March 20th. It’s time to think about planting for the spring.
Actually, as we’ve noted more than once, the fall months are the best time for planting, to allow time for root development before the warmth of spring awakens the plants. The coming of spring might be regarded more as the traditional time for planting because that’s when the first tastes of warm weather awaken the gardeners.
The garden centers and online nurseries are oriented to the spring rush of gardeners seeking a few floriferous features for their gardens. The surge of mail-order catalogs and magazine galleries of new introductions manifests this orientation.
It can be quite interesting to peruse the new plants that are offered at this time each year. There are many familiar favorites, but the real headliners are plants that have been recently discovered by plant hunters or created by hybridizers.
Some plant hunters roam the globe in search of garden-worthy plants that have not been seen in their natïve lands. The history of gardening includes a long list of plant hunters who have served to relocate plants from exotic places to the gardens of Europe and, more recently, the United States. The best known of the contemporary plant hunters is Daniel Hinkley who shares his travels and horticultural discoveries in his books and articles in Horticulture magazine and other periodicals. Check out his website.
Plant hunting doesn’t always require traipsing through distant lands. New discoveries also can be made by close observation of large groups of plants in cultivation. As plants pollinate each other, potentials exist for mutations or “sports” to appear with novel characteristics. Because these natural changes are random rather than evolutionary, they will include a significant percentage of uninteresting innovations, but occasionally a natural mutation results in a desirable variation of a familiar plant. Then, the grower’s role is to propagate the newcomer to produce enough plants for commercial distribution, come up with an appealing name for the plant, and introduced it into the trade.
A third approach to developing new plants involves hybridizing. The process is quite simple, at its core: the hybridizer selects two plants of the same species with different but desirable traits. For example, one might have a good blossom color and the other might have strong stems. The hybridizer transfers pollen from one plant to the other, plants the seeds that result from this mating, and examine the seedlings for the desired combination of traits. Typically, the hybridizer will reject many of the seedlings as unsuccessful relative to the objectives, and, with luck, will find one or more successful results. These are propagated further for commercial distribution.
Given the uncertain outcomes of this process, it requires time, patience, and good record-keeping to result in a financial payoff.
This brings to mind the secret to making a small fortune in the plant breeding business: begin with a large fortune.
The process of finding or creating new plants always targets the individual gardeners who want to add the latest introductions to their gardens. One that has caught my eye is a Sempervivum hybrid ‘Gold Nugget’, available from ChickCharms, which specializes in collectable hens & chicks. It’s a little pricey but quite striking.
Sempervivum ‘Gold Nugget’
The gardener might enjoy bringing new introductions to the landscape but could also stay with familiar and reliable options. Either way, enjoy your garden!