Echinacea Artisan™ Red Ombre & Soft Orange // 2 Exciting, Richly Colored, Easy to Grow, Coneflowers

Well good morning and welcome to Over the Vest Nurseries. It's a beautiful summer's day, the temperatures are beginning to get up, but that doesn't really bother us because in here on the nursery our plants are growing really well and also bringing lots and lots of color to our garden centers and we hope ultimately to your garden. And if you're looking to add some summer color to your garden, then let me introduce you to some of the fabulous varieties that are available today within these, the Coneflowers or Echinaceas as they're known botanically. Lots of different types, lots of different colors of course, ones that grow at different heights and also some that have really beautiful warming glowing colors. And here I'm excited to show you two varieties of the first F1 hybrids of Coneflowers to be introduced. These were developed at Pan American Seed Company by Keef Seeds, and there's two exciting selections here that I want to show you. The first of all, this variety is one called Artisan Red Ombre, and here's one as you see has this glowing bright red-orange color, produces lots and lots of flower buds, it's one that's going to get to about 18 inches to 2 foot high or thereabouts, and really bring a lot of bright glowing reddish color into our garden. Now the thing I should mention about F1 hybrids are that these are hybrids that are developed between two distinct breeding lines. Developed from native species, these are hardy selections that will grow anywhere within our region, they're ones that love to grow in a sunny, well-drained position, and that's important to be able to get them to persist well in the garden, they just do not like heavy-ish, wet, damp soils or clay soils. So make sure that wherever you plant it, it's a nice free-draining location, so that then you'll get lots of these gorgeous flowers that start to arrive in the earlier part of summer, and then if they're dead-headed, that means removing the old flower heads as they start to go over, and if you look at this one here, you'll see there's one which is just beginning to open, and it's showing off its bright red-orange color, but look at this one, and you'll see that the petals here are beginning to discolor. Now in about another week or so, these are going to turn into brownish color. At that point you can go in with a pair of pruners or hedging shears, or even just a pair of scissors, and you can snip this off, and that will then encourage it to make plenty of replacement buds, which then keeps the re-blooming going right through the rest of the summer. Now this variety is Red Ombre, very colorful, but then let me show you this glowing bright soft-orange colored one, which leads me to the name of this particular variety that's called Soft Orange, because as this one comes out, you'll see that it starts out with a very bright kind of glowing orange-y color, but then as the petals mature, you'll see that it goes down to a kind of softer shade of orange too. This one will get a little taller, it will be probably somewhere in the region of about two and a half foot high, by about two foot wide. It's a fairly upright growing variety, and just like Red Ombre, you'll see that this is also producing lots of flower buds. So both of them are really good, they're part of the Artisan collection developed by the seed company that normally grows and is well known for producing lots of annuals and bedding plants. Really a triumph of F1 hybrid breeding, brings vigor and vitality and lots of color to our garden. This is two very nice forms of the Artisan series from Pan American Seed Company, this is Echinacea Artisan Red Ombre, and this bright orange-y one here is called Echinacea Artisan Soft Orange.