The Poinsettia remains a favorite plant for the holidays. Plants, like people, sometimes make a…
We Still Grow Popular Nineteenth Century Annuals
We still grow popular nineteenth century annuals.
In 1878 a customer wrote Rochester, New York seed company owner James Vick, asking him to name his six favorite annuals.
Vick responded in his magazine Vick’s Illustrated Monthly with these words, “We hardly know what to recommend for six Annuals. Phlox, Striped Petunia, Double Portulaca, Pansy, Aster. Now we have only one more to select: Verbena, Mignonette, Dianthus, Morning Glory, Stock.
“Our readers had better select the last one for themselves, for we can’t find it in our heart to exclude so many good things from our list of six, and perhaps make hard feeling among our favorite flowers.”
The annuals that Vick listed are the same plants we grow today. The cultivar or hybrid may have changed but the same flowers continue to shine in our gardens.
Today they are the same flowers that appear in the spring at box stores and garden centers around the country.
Vick grew hundreds of dahlias, including new varieties, in his fields of display gardens both at his home and in his trial farm outside the city.
He was always in seach of a new dahlia hybrid. By the 1870s there were probably hundreds.
Noel Kingsbury writes in his book Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding, “”New versions of familiar plants sell well.”
The marketing of garden plants depends on what the gardener knows about plants. Old familiar varities attract a customer. Thus we see the same annuals in the garden year after year.
Take as an example, the supertunia, which is the number one annual for Proven Winners.
Vick spent a great deal of time hybridizing the petunia because he considered it a popular annual.
Kingsbury gets the credit as well for this wonderful quote from garden historian Richard Gorer in writing about garden plants. Gorer says, “The hybridizers appear to have gone on breeding the same plants that have been popular for so long…they seem to lack enterprise.”
Kingsbury makes the point too when he says that the hybridizing choices were linked to familiar plants both to the nursery and the gardener.
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