New year, new plants: Kimset® Echinacea
Ready or not, spring is here. We all knew it was coming; we spent the winter planning and preparing, reviewing our spreadsheets, and developing strategies and “Plan B” scenarios to prepare for every conceivable setback. But while the transition from fall to winter tends to be somewhat nuanced, spring likes to make a more dramatic entrance in our industry. Suddenly our crews are back, liners are shipping, buds are swelling, and perennials are peaking out above the protective soil barriers that have shielded them from freezing temperatures all winter. Although we’ve been busy thinking and talking about plants all winter, there’s nothing quite like the smell of fresh soil and the sight of emerging plants to energize us as we kick off the start to another new season.
And with a new season comes more new plant varieties to get excited about. We have particularly high expectations for some of our newest Echinacea additions. After trialing Echinacea Kismet® Intense Orange and Kismet® Raspberry last summer, we were so impressed by their performance that we decided to go all in and add them into production permanently. We will also be growing Kismet® Yellow and Kismet® Red.
There’s a lot to love about the Kismet® series. For one thing, the flowers are vivid, bright, and long-lasting, and new flowers are produced continuously from early summer through fall. The habit is compact and incredibly uniform, with plants growing to only 16” tall by 24” wide and flowers rising to 18”. But, although they’re small in stature, they are vigorous growers that really pack a punch when it comes to flower production; the number of flowers produced by a single plant is quite impressive. Another feature of this series that really caught our eye was the dark green flower stems. It was especially pronounced on the new flower stems of the Raspberry Echinacea and had the effect of intensifying the contrast between the raspberry- pink flowers and the clean green foliage.
Branding and marketing plants as part of a series has been incredibly successful over the past several years, especially when it comes to perennials. The Phlox Candy Store®, Dianthus Fruit Punch®, and Hibiscus Summerific® series are just a few examples of this: once you’ve seen one color you want to collect them all. We’ve had a lot of success with the Echinacea Sombrero® series over the years as well. Similar to the Kismet® Echinacea, they are vigorous growers with a compact habit and impressive flower production. One thing that sets these two series apart is size: the Sombrero® series is slightly larger, growing up to 20” tall and 24” wide. We’ve also heard from some growers that the Kismet® Echinacea may be more cold hardy, which, if true, would make them a great alternative to the Sombrero® coneflowers in more northern regions. But we will need to trial the two side by side before we can draw our own conclusions on this.
We trial a lot of new plants every year and, while many of them don’t make the cut, it’s all the more exciting when we find a variety that really lives up to the hype. We feel confident that the Kismet® Echinacea will be with us to stay. If you have any feedback you’d like to share about your experiences with our favorite new coneflowers, we’d love to hear it! Otherwise, our next crops are scheduled to be ready this summer.
