Echinacea Dark Shadows™ Wicked (Coneflower) // Amazing 😃 Free Flowering Beauty 🌼 🌼 for Sunny Sites 🦋

Well good afternoon and welcome to Over the Vest Nurseries. It's a beautiful bright sunny, if not also quite a toasty day here in our nursery, and as you see we're getting ready to send out a lot of these wonderful flowering native hybrids. These are Coneflowers or Echinacea as they're known botanically, and here on the end of this wagon is a variety that I'm really pleased to be able to show you, because this is an absolutely outstanding variety. It is, in case I forget to tell you, called Echinacea Dark Shadows Wicked. Here's a variety that only grows to about 15 to 16 inches, it's got a distinct kind of upright habit, very free flowering, and then when it does flower, as you see it produces these beautiful bright pink flowers that show off nicely, contrasting with a really nice dark brown central cone to the center part of each of the flowers, and then you also see that they're set off with dark colored stems, making a very nice contrast to all of the multiple flowers that each of these little plants is carrying. And that is one of the significant things that I want to show you about this variety, and that is that it's really nice and compact, but also very free flowering. It is claimed by Terra Nova Nurseries, the people who introduced it, to be one of their best ever hybrids, and certainly from what we see here on the nursery, we would back that up, because it's a very, very good variety, puts on a terrific show. And also what's quite interesting is that while it's very colorful here, when it emerges first, if you look at the tags here, you'll see that as the petals, the little ray florets, begin to mature, they take on a lighter coloring, which gives it, when it becomes a little bit older flowers, gives you a nice bicolor effect too. Like other cone flowers, it's important to grow it in the sunny, and this is the most important factor of all, grow it in a well-drained site. You can grow this either as a single specimen, but I would suggest that if you have the space, that you think about planting it for a mass display, because as you see here, with these young plants that are set out on the back of this wagon, that whenever you're able to group them together, you get a really terrific effect. What's more, the flowers are fragrant, so it's very nice to put around things like patios and swimming pools, and sitting out areas. It also makes a terrific cut flower, so if you're somebody who likes to cut some of your flowers and bring them inside into your home, this would make an excellent cut flower. You could also, of course, grow this in a container. I like to think about something that you would plant, because it's so short and compact, only about 15-16 inches as I said earlier, this is really a good plant to put down in a little bed or a border, or perhaps a raised bed somewhere above, perhaps a stone wall, somewhere where you're really going to be able to admire these terrific flowers. And incidentally, they are also highly attractive to pollinating insects, so if you've got this in the garden, you can look forward to bringing in all sorts of pollinators and butterflies, and I'm told even hummingbirds too. Raised by Terra Nova Nurseries, and introduced only in 2020, this is a terrific plant that of course would also, I think, be very popular in the New England or Boston area, with a name like Wicked on the end. It certainly is something that to us looks very colorful, extremely good plant, and as they would say in New England, Wicked Good. This is Echinacea Dark Shadows Wicked.