Forsythia Magical Gold® // Outstanding Hardy, Easy To Grow Shrub With Large Deep Yellow Flowers 👍👏

Well hello and welcome to Over-the-Vest Nurseries on a chilly morning in early spring. Now I don't know about you, but I certainly know that after the long cold winter I look forward every spring to seeing the bright cheery flowers of forsythia. It's wonderful how these hardy and reliable shrubs just seem to brighten up our lives with their sunshine colored flowers, with their bright golden yellow flowers that really bring our gardens alive, almost like flicking on a switch, they brighten up our whole landscape scenes. And here in front of me is an exciting new variety that's called forsythia magical gold. We've been testing and trialing it here on the nursery and quite literally we really have been very impressed with this plant. First of all when you look at it, you'll see that it has these enormous big bright golden cheery flowers that are just now breaking open for the first time. Then as I pan up here and you see the stems, you'll see that they are literally covered with masses, and in fact even packed with lots of flower buds that are just about to pop open, and in another week or so when all of these plants break out and show off all of their gorgeous bright sunshine colored flowers, you can imagine what a bright cheery sight this is. Now unlike some of the other forsythias that tend to have narrow, twisted and sometimes even rolled petals, as you see on this one, they are really nice big, broad, beautifully displayed petals that put on a terrific show. Add to that the fact that they are densely packed on stems that have short internodes, that's the spaces in between the buds and that helps to add considerably to the display too. Now most of the time the petals as you see are about four per flower, but sometimes if you look closely at the plants you'll see that they have like this one five and six petals on them too, all coming together to really put on a spectacular show. Now I don't need to tell you that forsythias are really reliable plants and easy to grow here in our region. Completely hardy right through the whole of our region, you don't need to worry about hardiness, they're really very good in that they put up with a very wide range of soil types, not really bothered by any pests and diseases worth talking about, and in fact you can pretty much plant them and enjoy them either as a single specimen, you could plant them in a line or a hedge, you could use them in foundation plantings, you could even use it as a kind of a screen, and of course if you're like me and you're looking forward to spring weather, you can go out now at this time of year and you can snip some of these dormant stems, put them in a vase of water, bring them into the warmth of the house and they'll pop out well ahead of the ones outdoors to give you a nice bright kind of harbinger of what's coming in springtime. Now when I'm looking at these plants I'm kind of secretly smiling to myself, not because of the cheery bright golden yellow flowers that they have, but because of the name, the name Forsythia, and that's because as a young man growing up in the UK and learning about gardening and cultivating plants, this was one of the first shrubs that I learned the name of, but the name is pronounced a little differently in the UK. Here in the US we call it Forsythia, that just rolls off my tongue now, but for years I struggled with that because in the UK we pronounce it as Forsythia, and it's interesting that the name comes about because it honors an important Scottish botanist called William Forsyth. He grew up in Aberdeenshire and became a Royal Head Gardener, worked for a time at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and became actually one of the founding members of the Royal Horticultural Society. So he had a long and illustrious career, and whenever these plants were brought out first, the name Forsythia, or Forsythia, whichever way you want to pronounce it, and it really doesn't matter, was named in his honor. Now just to give you a little bit more information on its origin, and this is a plant, believe it or not, that was hybridized behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Germany, before the wall came down. Peter Kolster of Kolster Nurseries in the Netherlands, was at a trade show in Essen in Germany. When he spotted this plant with its extra-large flowers, he could see that it really looked to be a beautiful variety with a lot of potential. Now he also noticed when he was doing some trials with it, as a plant that could be cut and forced for cut flowers, that it responded really well to pruning. And that's neat, because unlike many Forsythias that tend to make fairly wide-spreading, rather ungainly and rangy heads, if this plant is pruned back annually each spring, after the flowers begin to go over, that will encourage it to put on strong sturdy stems like these that are going to be loaded with lots of flowers and have a fairly narrow upright shape, which of course will be wonderful if you have tight spots, you want to grow it perhaps as a hedge or a small screen, or as a background to show off other shrubs. So here's a tough, hardy, reliable, easy to grow plant that has these enormous bright golden yellow flowers carried in abundance, and therefore that's why we think that this is going to be an important and outstanding variety going forward. This is Forsythia Magical Gold.