We’ll Always Have Next Year

By: Irvin Etienne

Crap! Where did summer go? In August I was still planting annuals. Not ideal, but much better than the year I really didn’t start until Labor Day. This year I was just finishing things. At least for the most part it was stuff I had propagated or seedlings I had collected. Admittedly, it would have been the perfect year to finish early (or heaven forbid timely) so as to enjoy the ridiculously cool weather. Well life ain’t perfect, is it Gladys? So I did the best I could considering at the minimum I quadrupled the back garden. Next year there will be fewer weeds and that will make things go smoother. With gardening there is always next year.

But what about this year? I tried several new Echinacea cultivars -- seven, to be exact, between work and home. I can recommend all of them to you. ‘Tomato Soup’ is a great red (very much like tomato soup), ‘Mac n Cheese’ is cheesy gold, and ‘Tiki Torch’ is hot orange. All these come via Terra Nova Nursery and I’m glad to have each in the garden. The colors are equal to the pictures in the catalogue, very rare in the plant world. I had four white cultivars at work, all a gift from Plants Nouveau. ‘Avalanche’ is a dwarf white around two feet tall. ‘Champagne Bubbles’ is a large single white whose cone is champagne colored. It’s a nice big plant and flower. The dwarfest one was ‘Meringue’, fully double and only a foot or so high. My favorite was by far ‘Milkshake’, a tall, normal sized coneflower with large double flowers. The cones remain white as they age, very rare in Echinacea. It is a great cutflower too. I fully intend to trial more from these companies next year, say some double red, double orange, and double gold? I’m not saying every new coneflower is going to be great but I have seen some very good ones.

It was a great lily year, the flowers lasted forever. The big award goes to ‘Yelloween’. This beauty is soft yellow and fragrant. My largest plant was eight feet tall. Of course, the deep orange of the 3-4 foot tall ‘Brunello’ was gorgeous too. He’s so beautiful he doesn’t need fragrance. Darkest red ‘Blackout’ was a stunner too that is propagating itself nicely, increasing the number of bulbs and flowers yearly. I was a little disappointed in my ‘African Queen’ only because half the bulbs flowered white instead of the amber color I wanted. But it did look like all bulbs bloomed so I can’t complain a whole lot. Plus I bought them at half price last year.

Among my favorite annuals this year were two cultivars of black-eyed Susan vine, Thunbergia alata. These were ‘Sunny Lemon Star’ and ‘Sunny Orange Wonder’. Both had incredible vigor and flower power in wonderful bright yellow (not gold) and deep true orange. I have grown this species from seed and these cutting propagated plants are much better performers. Other vegetative cultivars I’ve tried never did as well as these. Either the plants have improved or my gardening skills have really improved.

It’s hard to believe the time to bring plants back indoors is nearly at hand. I always dread it. Just one more week, Mother Nature. Just one more week. But that isn’t the way of the Midwest garden so I will try to save too many and will kill too many in the end. But there’s next year. There’s always next year.