Ground Breaking Banter - Rick
Peach may just be the perfect garden color: it blends well with nearly everything, never calls too much attention to itself, and just generally looks clean, calm, and refreshing. It’s so widely loved, that the 2024 Pantone Color of the Year is Peach Fuzz, so we thought it would be an ideal time to celebrate this hue, that, in the words of Pantone, “…resonates with compassion, offers a tactile embrace, and effortlessly bridges the youthful with the timeless.”
A few of our favorite peachy plants include:
Double Take Peach Quince
Take something like RAINBOW RHYTHM® ‘Orange Smoothie’ Hemerocallis it doesn’t look orange to me.
At Last Rose: Do you consider it Apricot? Peach? Orange?
Firefly Peach Sky Yarrow Light peachy orange flowers age to yellow. Mature and new flowers create a blend of colors, much like you would find on a peach fruit.
Oso Easy® Sunorita® Landscape Rose (Rosa hybrid)
Flavorette® Honey-Apricot Rose (Rosa hybrid) – New Proven Winners® Variety 2024
Superbells® Double Vintage Coral™ (Calibrachoa hybrid) – New Proven Winners® Variety 2024
Meant to Bee™ Queen Nectarine Anise Hyssop (Agastache hybrid)
Solenia® Apricot (Begonia hybrid) – New Proven Winners® Variety 2024
Rockapulco® Tropical Shades Double ImpatiensImpatiens walleriana
Caladium Heart to Heart ‘Chinook’
Superbena ‘Peachy Keen’
Sedona Sunset Coleus and Sweet Caroline Sweetheart Mahogany™ Sweet Potato Vine together.
Bulbs like Cannas, Dahlias, Tuberous begonias, Tulips
Join us on your favorite podcast platform or at the YouTube link above to hear our whole conversation on the color peach.
In keeping with the peach theme of today’s show, we do have a perfectly peachy plant – Double Take Peach flowering quince – but seeing as it is the middle of summer and it feels a little out of place to celebrate a spring blooming plant, I’m opting for something equally peachy, even if it’s not right there in the name – Ringo All Star rose.
Like the other three roses in the Ringo series, Ringo All Star is a selection of Rosa persica, also known as Hulthemia. This parentage gives the flowers two very distinctive features: one, the center is characterized with a dramatic dark colored eye, and two, as the flowers age, the blooms go from a deep saturated tone to a paler tone, sometimes of a different color entirely. In the case of Ringo All Star rose, the flowers start out deep orange-pink at the edge and shade to a perfect peach as they near the blazing red ring in the center. Add in the crown of fluffy yellow stamens in the center and it is quite a display! As the flowers age, the outer edge goes pure pink, the peach becomes a soft peachy yellow, and the eye stays red but with a slight flush of pink. Once the plant starts flowering in June, you see flowers in all stages at once, giving the plant a really distinctive appearance that’s never the same throughout each day.
The parents, now many times removed, of the Ringo series are native to dry, desert areas of the Middle East, where they grow in almost pure sand. They have bright yellow petals, a deep red eye, and really very cool blue foliage that looks nothing like you’d expect to see on a rose. The buds are covered in large thorns, too. It’s a sprawling plant, almost more herbaceous than woody like we’re used to seeing with roses, and is often known to grown on the outskirts of agricultural fields where it is harvested after the crop and used for fuel oil.
Fortunately, this wild and somewhat weedy (though very beautiful, in my opinion!) rose hybridizes readily with other roses, and many breeders around the world have been capitalizing on this tendency for decades in an attempt to develop more colors and more color changes. That’s where the Ringo series comes in. They were all developed by Chris Warner in the UK, a brilliant rose breeder who is behind a number of Proven Winners ColorChoice roses, including Adriana’s favorite, Rise Up Lilac Days.
That Rosa persica parentage also makes these plants vigorous, healthy, and somewhat drought tolerant – though, like all roses, even though it can tolerate difficult conditions, it will slow or stop blooming if it gets too stressed. Its desert heritage also means it is a good choice for dry, sunny places – high humidity can be an issue, so if you live in an area of high humidity, this rose is going to be best planted where it can get plenty of air circulation – don’t crowd it.
Hardy in USDA zones 4-8, 2-3’ tall and 3’ wide.
If you’d like to add Ringo All Star rose – or any of the 320+ Proven Winners ColorChoice Shrubs – to your garden or landscape, you’ll find a list of local retailers here.
Gardening Mail Bag - Stacey
You should definitely try again! Metal might not be the best choice, so consider using plastic nursery pots that will fit inside a more decorative container once you bring it indoors. And of course, be sure the pots have drainage holes. You can get more tips here.
Prickly foliage aside, it should be relatively easy to move or transplant a juniper. However, no matter how careful you are in transplanting, the plant will lose some roots, so it’s a good idea to compensate by removing some of the top growth. You can either trim it back or remove about one-quarter to one-third of the stems, tracing them back to the main stem on the shrub, though I’d recommend the latter for a more natural look. Cut back what you need to get the job done, and you can always cut more later if you feel it is warranted. And yes, the juniper should do great by the lake! Junipers are very drought tolerant so once it has recovered from being transplanted, it should be right at home.
This is almost certainly a disease known as aster yellows. It affects any member of the daisy family – and in fact, several other plants that aren’t in the daisy family – and is unfortunately incurable. As such, the recommendation is to remove and destroy any affected plants, which will keep it from spreading: the disease, known as a phytoplasma, is in the plant’s vascular system. When a leaf hopper or other piercing/sucking insect feeds on it and then goes off to feed on a different plant, it will transmit the disease to that one, so removing affected plants goes a long way toward minimizing the disease. It can be painful, especially for plants that you’ve grown yourself from seed, but it is necessary to save the plants that haven’t been affected. You can learn more about aster yellows here. It does bear mentioning here that aster mites, an insect-like pest, can cause damage similar to but ultimately distinct from aster yellows – check out this excellent resource from OSU comparing the two.
Do you have a question for us? We’re happy to help! E-mail us or use the contact tab above. Due to high volume, we may not get to your question, so if you need an answer quickly, please reach out via the Proven Winners website.
Branching News - Rick
Laura Robles, product manager at Proven Winners perennial partner Walters Gardens, joins us in the episode to talk about one of our favorite plants: Summerific hibiscus. Join us on your favorite podcast platform or at the YouTube link above to find out what makes these hardy perennials so amazing, and what’s coming next for summer’s hottest flower.
