Best Performing Plants at the 2024 MSU Horticulture Gardens: Michigan Garden Plant Tour
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EmailDecember 18, 2024
Abby Makowski, Michigan State University, describes the outstanding performers from their 2024 trial garden from the 2024 Michigan Garden Plant Tour.
The MSU Plant Trial Garden showcases a wide range of annuals, vegetables, herbs, and herbaceous perennials. We evaluate plants submitted by breeding companies, All America Selections, and Fleuroselect. We track plant performance, vigor, uniformity, ornamental value, disease tolerance, and response to climatic conditions. This unbiased information is summarized and made available to participating companies, industry professionals, and the general gardening public.
Presentation was live at Greenhouse Grower Expo 2024. Produced and edited by MSU Extension Educator, Heidi Lindberg.
Video Transcript
I know all summer long, I was in one garden, and that was mine. My garden is only 1.1 acres, but we do trial 3-400 varieties that includes container trials for annuals, as well as in ground annuals. I do AS selections, and I also have a three year perennial trial. So I think I'll actually start with some of the perennials that I was really impressed with this year. Um. First, I have the Budia Little Rock stars series from Doom and Orange. This was new this year for me. I really liked the entire series. They were super compact. We're talking maybe a foot by a foot. They're really, really tiny. From what I can tell, they would be great in a perennial container. Um, I really liked all the colors in the series. The blue was my favorite. Hence why that is what I have a photo of. A lot of the things you're going to see, I have a photo of it because I personally really liked it. All the plants on my list were they got fives in all the categories that I rate them on. And then I just picked sort of what I thought was the most interesting. Or I definitely crowdsourced and asked the students that work for me, what did they like the most? And so some of that, if I didn't particularly like it, it might be because somebody else I work with really enjoyed it. Next up I also have that heliopsis orlevarigata from must have perennials. I hate variegated leaves on plants like this, and I really like this one. It was surprising because it didn't look like it was disease, which I was really, really impressed with. Then I have the second year for this StumRocking robe midnight velvet. It was just a really good plant. I tend to like stums but sometimes I'm not a huge fan of the dark leaf and so it really surprised me that I liked this one. It did really well. I survived the winter really well, and we'll see what it does next year. This Rudeki is on its third and final year. After this winter, it will be getting ripped out. Um but I believe it received top marks since it was planted. It was a seed grown one, and it has absolutely taken over the plot that it's in. So it will be nice to get that space back because it's far, far outgrown the bounds that it is meant to be in. But it's just a really solid standard yellow Rubekia cultivar. Then next up we get into the annuals, which are my favorites. Annuals are my whole stick. But I really liked the Space Age foliage begonia series from proven winners. All of them that I tried were really nice, but I really like Tritone in particular because it was just something different than the standard rex begonias that you see where they have you know, the dark center and the lightish gray green sort of looked to them, maybe a little bit of red, a little bit of purple, something like that. This one was just really different to me, and it did really well both in ground, in containers. I used it in some combos in the area that we have weddings in, and it looked phenomenal all season long. And then here we have some of that overlap. I selected the pink B Color glory days as one that I really liked. Craig said, none of this photographs as well as it just can't compete with seeing it in person and seeing it washed out on a big screen like this just really does not do it justice. But I did also really like that orange one, but the I had something for pink this year. I really, really, really liked this pink one. And I will admit when I got the cuttings for these gerams, they were in horrible condition. I got them a week later than I was supposed to. They went through customs. They were opened, they were closed back up. They were open, close back up. The package was filled all over the box, and I thought they were all going to die and they did amazing. Once they bounced back from, you know, being in cutting purgatory, they did really well in the garden. I was really impressed. Then we have again, more overlap. That sun infinity double yellow was just really impressive. From start to finish, it was blooming all summer long. Like Craig said, even the old flowers don't look bad. They don't detract from the plant in any way, which I was really impressed with. Then we had end of season about the last week of August, we had a storm that blew through that was like Category one Hurricane Force winds and rain. I blew in and it destroyed so much stuff. And this, honestly, there was maybe one broken branch on all of the plants. So I was really, really impressed with the fact that it stood up to just about some of the worst weather we could throw at it. And that was at the end of the season when you sort of expect everything to be going downhill and it looked great until we ripped it out in mid October, I believe. And then again, a little bit more overlap, but just a different color in the series. The Pet coa Super Cow, premium Pink Mist is the one that I found to be my favorite. I really like the Rose stars well that Brian mentioned, but the pink mist started as like a modeled sort of dark pink, and as it faded, it turned to shades of white and pink that I just found to be really appealing. So the fading flowers were still nice to look at, which I definitely like it when plants still look good as the flowers are aging and they don't require me to go in and deadhead or do anything to make them look better just because they're unattractive. I was really impressed with this osteospermum mix. It was the Hawaii Sunset mix from Pan American. I don't tend to love osteospermum, just because they are a spring or fall crop. They're not an all summer long crop. Um, so because of the seasonality, I tend to not like them as much. But this Osteo did really well, even in the heat of the summer. It slowed down a little bit, but it did great. And the colors were just phenomenal. These pictures do not do those colors justice. They were so saturated, so vibrant. The mix itself was just really beautiful. And then I had a vinca. I almost went with the XDR mix from Syngenta, so I'm glad that I picked a different one because you would have heard about the same exact plants for the third time in a row. I really liked the soiree double series from Suntory. I just thought they had a really unique flower shape that was just really eye catching. I liked all of the colors in the series, but the pink improved was my favorite. It was just a bubblegum pink that was just so classic. Would go with a lot of colors. I tragically don't have a photo of the apple blossom, which was my favorite color. But I didn't take picture of it. I don't think about it during the season that I should be taking photos of the things that I like. Sometimes I'm stuck with just picking whatever I actually have a photo of to use. Then I do also have a lobelia. I have a different one than the one that Christi picked. I went with the heat topia dark blue from ball flora. It was it really stood up to really crappy weather conditions. It did really well in the hot and dry conditions without fading at all, which I was really impressed with. I don't tend to like lobelias just because they do look tired. They do tend to crap out midseason and I just all season long plants. So I was really impressed to the point that I would consider using this one in the future. And then I had the virtuoso series of dahias from proven winners. They were really impressive just because they all got powdery mildew super early on in the season for me, and then they all grew out of it and bounced back really quickly. And by the end of the season, you could not tell that they had had powdery mildew at all. It was so bad that I thought they were all going to die and I was just going to have four empty plots for the rest of the summer. But they bounced back. They looked great. I really liked all the colors. But again, I was leaning towards pink this year, so the pink terrific really did it for me. And then I have my last two where the Kufia chantia white. I enjoy the Alison Heather sort of that Mexican heather Kufia a lot. I really particularly liked this white one. You normally see Kufias that are pink, purples, reds, violets. They're not ever, um white, which I was just really impressed with, I would've been great. It looked amazing on its own, but it also looked really, really good in some of the combo containers that I used it in. It stood up to literally everything, hot weather, dry weather, cold and wet, you name it. I looked the same all summer long. I actually had trouble looking at some of my evaluation photos because I couldn't tell if it was the same photo repeated or if they were actually from different evaluation dates because it looked the same all summer long. And then my favorite plant because I had so many people talk to me about this and I couldn't stop fugging about it and I kept asking people I was like, Take a picture of it. When you see it, I need good pictures of this plant, was the Ageetu monarch magic from ball floor plant? I have no words for it. It was already a decent plant. It was neat and tidy in habit. It didn't take over. It had a decent amount of vigor. I didn't get disease, stood up to all weather conditions. But the monarchs truly love this thing. One of my co workers described it as a tornado of monarchs that she witnessed. At any given time, there were 10-20 monarchs around this plant, even on the container that it was in, and it was just really impressive all summer long. I know people always talk about plants for monarchs and how they need to be native perennials and this and that. But I'm like, why can't your annuals also attract monarchs. So that one was really fun and honestly, probably a great advertising opportunity is the fact that it is a monarch magnet.