For the plantaholic, the New Year brings new vices. Fortunately, most of them are harmless and the conundrum gardeners are most often faced with is finding a good home for this year’s novelties in an already crowded garden.
One person who is always ready to play to our weakness is nurseryman Dan Heims of Terra Nova Nurseries. Terra Nova is a wholesale nursery situated just 25 miles south of Portland, Oregon; for sourcing plants from them in your area, this page will direct you to a store near you.
When it comes to color, curiosity and the “wow” factor, Heims’s breeding program has developed a formula for success. This year, leading the charge for “something completely new” is Mukgenia Nova™ ‘Flame’. It may sound like you are knee deep in sludge, but Mukgenia is actually the first ever intergeneric hybrid between a Bergenia (pigsqueak) and Mukdenia ‘Crimson Fans’.
Mukdenia (the parent) is essentially a coral bell (Heuchera) with palmate leaves. Their foliage colors beautifully as the season progresses. The green palmate leaves become tinged with a brilliant red. The only problem, here in our New York climate, is that the foliage senesces rapidly in late summer; particularly when it has been a hot summer.
An indispensable addition to any late summer garden is the hummingbird mints (Agastache). They are magnets for butterflies and hummingbirds and generally flower from July well into October.
They are heat tolerant candidates for your garden that thrive in xeric gardens with low fertility. They are in the mint family but are the well-behaved cousin that doesn’t run all over the place. With their fragrant foliage, they are deer and rabbit resistant.
We have several cultivars of Agastache in our Trial Bed Garden in the Home Gardening Center. At the end of the Trial Bed we have a tall upright cultivar called Agastache ‘Heatwave’. It reaches between 3-4 feet tall and has deliciously fragrant blue green foliage. It is covered at this time of year with raspberry colored tubular flowers. Based on its growth habit it is an ideal candidate for the middle of a border.
At the other end of the bed is a more compact hummingbird mint named Agastache ‘Acapulco Salmon & Pink™’. It is part of a popular Acapulco series that come in a variety of colors. As the name suggests it has a pretty blend of salmon and pink flowers. The shape of this hummingbird mint is reminiscent of a catmint (Nepeta) and it sprawls to form a low-growing mound that produces colorful spires of flowers.
