Echinacea Big Kahuna (Coneflower) / Beautiful 👌, Big, Fragrant Honey-Mango Bi-color Flowers

Well, hello and welcome to Over-the-Vest Nurseries on a beautiful summer's day in mid-summer. The temperature's getting a little on the toasty side but you know what, it's nice to be outside. There's a gentle breeze blowing and that's helping to cool things down as we get ready to produce even more plants that we'll send out to our network of garden centers that are located right throughout our region. That's the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states of the U.S. And if you're interested in finding out more about the plants that we grow and sell through the garden centers, then I'd suggest that you think about clicking and subscribing to this channel, and then as we post new videos, which we're doing all the time, you'll be first in line to find out about all the fabulous plants that you can grow in this region. We specialize in finding varieties that are really well suited to this region, and if you're really looking for color during the summer months and you want something that is nice and fragrant and will put on a terrific display, then let me introduce you to this variety of Boneflower that we have here on the end of the wagon. And this is really quite appropriately named because this is Echinacea the Big Kahuna, and this variety, as you see, has these gorgeous large flowers that can be as much as five inches wide. Add to that the fact that they have this beautiful bright gleaming color that gives you, as well as lots of vibrant color, a lovely central cone to the flowers, and also a nice bicolor effect too. If you look at this flower here, you'll see that overall it's kind of got a mango color, but if you look into the center of the cones here, you'll see that it's got kind of tangerine color, a kind of tangerine-orange color, and then as it fades out towards the tips, you'll see that it's more yellowish shade. So it's got that nice kind of bicolor effect that just gleams and beams lots of color. Here's a plant that despite its name's suggestion, is not that big a grower. It grows about 18 inches to two foot high. Occasionally if it's in really good fertile conditions and doing well, you might get it up to about two and a half foot high or thereabouts, but in the main it's going to be in and around about two foot. It's really these dramatic big multi-petal flowers that gives it that Hawaiian name, which of course means the big one, the preeminent one, and therefore it's one that when you plant it out in your garden is definitely going to be seen to be the boss of your floral display. Add to that the fact that it is nice and free flowering too, producing plenty of buds from down inside the crown. You'll see that here in the leaf axles, there's little embryonic buds then just beginning to get ready to take their turn in the sunlight. But one of the things that's pretty important if you want to try and keep a good succession of flowering going on through the summertime and into the fall, and that is that as the flowers begin to go over, you just cut out the faded flowers, just trim them out about where my fingers are here, back to a leaf axle, and then you'll find that that will encourage plenty of young buds that will come up from deeper inside the crown, and that keeps the recycle of re-bloom going through. So it doesn't really matter if you don't deadhead them, they're still going to grow and they're still going to flower, but by taking out the old faded flowers, you'll definitely increase the cycle of blooming, and extend it a bit too. Raised at Terra Nova Nurseries, this is an exciting variety that's hardy throughout our region, it's a hardy Zone 4 variety, likes to grow in a sunny or partially shaded site, and it's very important when you plant it out that you choose a site that's got free-draining soil. Coneflowers really do not like to be in dampish or wettish or clay soils, so just make sure that the drainage is good, check that, set the plant a little higher if you're suspect or worried about it perhaps lying a little wet during the wintertime or in springtime after snowmelt, but otherwise you will find that this really is a good, big, strong, sturdy flowered variety, which incidentally makes a wonderful cut flower too. These stems are easily cut and if you put them in a vase of water you'll be able to enjoy, and I nearly forgot to mention, the fabulous fragrance that comes from this variety too. You don't normally think of coneflowers as being fragrant, most of them have at least some form of fragrance, but when you smell this one when you go to the garden center, definitely I encourage you to get fairly close to it and enjoy the fragrance, because it really is very, very noticeable with this variety, therefore it would be good to put in sunny places like sitting out areas, around swimming pools, patio decks, that sort of thing. So if you're looking for a really, very nice, hardy, tough, reliable variety that's going to give you this extra-large, beautifully fragrant and colored flowers, then look for Echinacea Big Kahuna