New plant introductions and the challenges of selling them
Last month, our team attended the annual Gold Key meeting at Spring Meadow Nursery in Grand Haven, Michigan. We always look forward to this unique opportunity to network with other growers from around the country, and, in more recent years, from around the world. One of the highlights of the event is touring the trial gardens and R&D greenhouses to get an early look at new varieties before they hit the market and to see where future genetics are headed. Attendees are given flags and invited to choose the yet unnamed cultivars they would like to see developed further, and Spring Meadow uses this input when deciding which future varieties to market and release under the Proven Winners® brand.
As growers, we love trialing new plants. We base the majority of our production around our bread-and-butter varieties like Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ and Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’, Allium ‘Summer Beauty’ and Buxus ‘Green Velvet’. These are our “never-out” varieties, our order builders, the boring yet reliable plants that we need to have readily available if we are to be successful in any given year. But, at the end of the day, our annual production of 18,000 Annabelle Hydrangeas and 30,000 Karl Foerster grasses is what allows us to trial the newest Echinaceas, the latest PW Hydrangeas, and that unique Hosta introduction we saw in the Walters Gardens trial gardens last summer.
We enjoy trialing new varieties because, well, for one thing, it’s fun, and it’s a great way to engage with our customers. But we also do it because we feel that our role in the industry goes beyond simply sharing photos of new plants and asking our customers to try them. Part of our responsibility as growers is to go beyond the marketing and determine for ourselves whether we think a new plant is worth growing, and to pass our honest feedback on to our customers. Often, we find that new plants don’t live up to the hype. They may be hardy at the trial gardens in Michigan, but not survive the winters of our colder climate. They may not be significantly different from existing varieties already on the market, or, sometimes, they simply don’t perform well for us.
But then there are those new varieties that blow us away, the ones that we rave about and can’t wait to share with our customers. One such success story is Allium ‘Millenium’. At the time of our Customer Appreciation Day five years ago, we grew less than 6,000 units of the then relatively new plant. We toured customers around the nursery and showed them the flowers of our new favorite Allium. Since then, production has exploded. Last year, we sold over 20,000 plants and were sold out by fall. Today, Allium ‘Millenium’ has taken over as one of the top-selling perennials in our region.
It would be nice if every great new plant had a story like Millenium Allium, and this may be the outcome that breeders expect when they release a new variety into the market. But, unfortunately, it’s usually not that simple. I think that what breeders and hybridizers, and even we, as growers, don’t always understand, are the many challenges faced by garden centers and rewholesalers and how that affects their ability to try new plants. Thousands of new introductions have flooded into the market over the past few years, but many of the green goods buyers we work with are losing space to hard goods and other departments. Retailers and rewholesalers are becoming more and more selective about what they can put on their benches because of limited space and the extra steps required to set up SKU’s and pricing for each new variety. One of our customers recently shared with us that it takes, on average, two to three years for a new variety to catch on with landscapers. This is a major commitment, and it helps explain why our customers need to be so discriminating when deciding which new varieties to adopt into their product lines. They can’t afford to take a chance on a plant that may not hold up over time, or one that will soon be replaced by a new and improved variety.
As growers, we know that continuing to integrate new plants into our program is the way we move forward. By phasing out older, overused varieties with those that require less maintenance and chemicals because of improved genetics, we can increase the efficiency of production and simplify the lives of our end customers. So, when we find a great new plant, it can be endlessly frustrating when it doesn’t sell. But we, as well as the plant breeding industry, need to understand the process by which these new plants move throughout the market and find better ways to work with the garden centers, rewholesalers, landscapers, and designers in our industry to better understand their challenges and to make the process work for all of us.
