Yes,
it was an exciting day in the annals of catalogue plant porn when the Big Sky Echinaceas came out. Oh, those soft yellows and
oranges, and what a breakthrough for lovers of the stalwart pinky purple Coneflower, who were longing to spice things up in their horticultural bedrooms. Then we brought these
newcomers breathlessly to our gardens and found out very quickly that they
didn’t last. Not here in the north, anyway. Now everybody and
their plant snipping brother is producing new and wilder shades in every
flowering form and configuration possible. Double Deckers, pom poms with
short petals, pom poms with long petals, greens, screaming reds, an
impossible array of tropical looking orange and yellow shades with tropical
sounding names like Tiki Torch, Aloha, Leilani, Pina Colada and Hot papaya, and, of
course, dwarf container sized plants with cutsy names too (just what a
prairie plant was meant for, right?). They have, and so have we all its
seems, become intoxicated with the equatorial fever of our garish new Coneflowers. They would surely look at home in the tropics.
The
problem is not just a matter of their shaggy tropical looks (in fact
the absence of actual cones on many of these so-called Coneflowers), but of the
persistent issue of garden toughness. Even the rugged sounding Cheyenne
Spirit series (available from seed as well as plants) have proven to be weak
growers and better used as annual fillers than reliably hardy garden plants.
They have certainly lost some of their prairie toughness along the way. I
have tried both nursery bought plants and seed grown Cheyenne Spirit, not to
mention the Big Skys. Most disappeared or never developed into full
grown plants, and few have persisted into their 3rd year in the
garden. This year I’m going to be trying out a compact but thankfully not
miniature new orange Coneflower called Adobe Orange. Unlike the Big Sky’s
developed in the Southeastern US, these have been trialed in Michigan and are
rated Zone 4 hardy. We shall see. (Update: We shall not see. Walters Gardens reports crop failure in 2018). The good thing about these (in theory, see above) is
that they maintain an old-fashioned Echinacea look. They have a prominent
cone and some petals that point downward (God forbid we grow anything so
primitive and unstylish in our gardens these days).
Which
brings me to a rant about the series of mop-head coneless Coneflowers that look
like little more than bad dye jobs on top of bad hair days. The ones with
the mops and the long widely spaced petals look like a sad gappy daisy with a
pom pom Zinnia or Mum dropped on top of it. Please just grow Zinnias or
Mums. They still come in a wider range of colors and will probably last
just as long in your garden without fading.
There’s
always an exception. I have seen one very strong group of the Double
Decker Echinaceas returning in a local garden, but then
wouldn’t you know that the very ugliest and earliest purveyor of bad hair is
the only one that seems to survive here. It of course is in the
traditional pink.
The
fact remains, while our nurseries are full of these bold new Coneflowers our
gardens are not, which is one of the best proofs that these plants are little
more than an impulse buying scam designed to part you with your hard earned
money. Plant porn indeed since in real life they are never as good as in the glossy pictures. And have you noticed how many of the oranges fade to an anemic,
grubby pink after about a week. The greens turn pink and the oranges turn
pink and the reds fade like dollar store hummingbird feeders after one season in the sun.
Here’s
an idea. You’d think having taken pink and yellow and white (the original
Echinacea colors) and bred them into such a wide array of bold reds and oranges and so many nuanced pastels,
that they’d be able to get the original pinky/purple Echinacea to a true
purple. That is what I am waiting for. That is the evolution that
would make the most spectacular of coneflowers, because it would
preserve that pleasurable shock of contrast between the pink and
orange that made Echinacea purpurea so irresistible in the first place, but
turn it into a delicious complimentary color combination.
On our present course, we may lose our appreciation for what made the Coneflower so unique--it’s internal color contrast and, increasingly, the cones
themselves for which these plants are known.
