Incredible Plant Breeding - Butterfly Candy

This was an amazing visit we had to Van Son and Coet in the Netherlands. We went with our friend, Peter, who took us to several nurseries on this day. You can see in that photo there the size and scale of this nursery. This is a very big nursery for the Netherlands. This is Peter on the right, took us to several different nurseries, and that's Jim Coet, the very tall, very tall gentleman from the Netherlands there. He is actually the breeder for Butterfly Candy, Butterfly Bushes, and we're going to hear from him in just a minute on that breeding program. He's got all kinds of things happening in various breeding programs for hydrangeas, Japanese maples, just really, really cool stuff. This is a garden they have outside their nursery that we walked through before we went in and looked at the inside of their incredible nursery space. You can see all the various hydrangeas. Here's one of the newer Butterfly Candy, Butterfly Bushes that's coming. There are five in the U.S. already, and there's several more in the breeding program once they've made it into the garden here. They will be part of that program in the future. It takes a minute to get things across borders now, which is a good thing, just making sure things are disease-free and all that kind of thing before they get into the U.S. He's got an incredible collection of Japanese maples, hydrangeas. There's some North American native things in this garden as well. Here's another one of the Butterfly Candy, Butterfly Bushes, and again, this breeding program's absolutely amazing, all the things he was working on. This is one thing we were talking about. He actually uses wood chips in the Netherlands, same as we do in our Raleigh-based home, and it really does build soil in a hurry. He's in a part of the Netherlands right here where the soil drains very, very quickly, so slowing that water down a little bit makes all the watering more efficient, helps build that soil. Again, exactly the same that we're doing in the Raleigh garden that I've been showing off, so it was fascinating to see the same exact approach in the Netherlands to soil building in their, I guess we would call it arboretum or botanic garden here at the nursery where they're putting things in the ground and giving them a test. This is hydrangea arborescens, it's a North American native. You see this a lot of times hiking in the mountains in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia. You'll see hydrangea arborescens, a lot of breeding around those in the last few years for sure. Here's another one. More butterfly candy here out there in their displays, but just crazy colors coming. Another one of the butterfly candy, butterfly bushes. This is raspberry. Raspberry's a little more vigorous than the other varieties, but man, does that thing bloom like crazy. That one's been the standout in our Raleigh garden, is a little raspberry. Again, just some various views out here in the garden. You just don't expect this when you pull up to a nursery, that you're going to see all of these things in full flower. This was August as we were filming this, and we were in the eastern side of the Netherlands. This is cascade red Japanese maple. This is actually one that's out on the market, but you see how that thing weeps directly down and onto the ground. He's got several things in his breeding program, which we weren't allowed to film. They're that new, that are similar to that in habit. A lot of nandinas over there, a lot of the nandinas that are not seed setting, they're non-flowering nandinas, but a lot of trialing going on around various nandinas, including some variegated ones we saw as well. The marketing of plants over there, so this is a moonrise Japanese maple. This nursery grows hundreds of thousands of Japanese maples, mostly in small containers like this. This is moonrise, one that's been on the market for a long time, but look at the marketing that goes into it, how perfect every plant is, the tags, the signs, all of it. The detail on the nurseries in the Netherlands is just wild. This is a stellar ruby magnolia in basically a trade gallon container, a one gallon container we call it here in the States, but you see this is a plant that's breeding from Zebulon, North Carolina, right down the road from us in Raleigh, and it's over in the Netherlands. Look how identical every single plant is. This was in a room that just blew me and Steph's mind. I put a photo on Instagram of this. These are hundreds of thousands of grafted Japanese maples, and they end up in various stores across Europe. Then here's the packaging on them. So they'll do these mixed trays like this, and each, so there'll be like four or six of four or five different varieties, whatever it is, the customer orders. Here's eucalyptus in a colored pot for the foliage, and then the perfect sign on it. Everything is so detailed. Look at just the floor in this nursery, you know, the concrete paths, and then the fabric is stretched and tied in, there's no weeds in this entire place. It's just wild the amount of detail you'll see, but again, this is this eucalyptus series that they have. Again, you know, this is the type of thing that ends up on, you know, that's going to sell, you know, if you get that out into the world looking like that. There's that variegated Nandina I was talking about. I think we'll see more of those. We have a variegated one in our garden, but not quite as formal of a plant as that particular one, but that's one I think we'll see in the States. Rosemary, you know, look how perfect each of these rosemary's are. Here's the lemon lime Nandina, which we saw some of the ones that are in the Southern Living Plant Collection over there as well. And then what we have here, this is more of those Japanese maples, just literally hundreds of thousands of them a year. They do the grafts and then grow them out to about this size and then put a really cool tag on them and then, you know, put them on a shelf in a size that, you know, people can afford and is attractive on the table as well. So that was kind of fun. We're going to let Jim coming up in just a minute to talk about Butterfly Candy, a series of butterfly bushes and the continuing work that he's doing on that. Okay, welcome to the Netherlands. My name is Jim Koot and I am the CEO of Volzonnekoot in Kaatsheuvel in the Netherlands. And here I want to show you our butterfly candy world. I know there are five nice butterfly candies in the USA at the moment, but in a few years time you can enjoy more and more colors. So you see here our goal. We started this breeding maybe six, seven years, eight years ago. And our goal for the future and for now is to make compact growing butterflies like this three years old plant, maybe what it is in inches, one and one and a half feet high. And yeah, let us work on the future of the butterfly candy in the USA. The butterfly candy, you know, is really good food for the butterflies and the bees and all the insects. It's in the normal period you see a lot of butterflies coming in, fly away, enjoy it here. Butterfly candies are easy but liars. You can use these plants in the garden, as you see here, but also on patio in a nice deco container. They are hardy from zone five till zone nine. They like full sun, but also a little bit shade. And yeah, enjoy your butterfly candies, shall I say. And thank you for visiting. So you can see how many, how many different butterfly bushes they're looking at and all forms and sizes and you get some of them that are just really incredibly compact, but probably compact to the point of, you know, nursery men aren't going to, you know, like them quite as much because they may take a couple of seasons to finish. So there has to be this delicate balance between being super, super compact in the garden, but also workable, you know, for a nursery man as well. But crazy, absolute crazy colors and shades of compact growing butterfly bushes coming. Hardy begonias. You've seen this series of hardy begonias, you know, in our, you know, up into the Raleigh area now. Some of these zone seven hardy begonias. He's doing a trial here for them over in the Netherlands. But we've seen this, this series is, you know, just really quite beautiful. Everything they do, you know, it's just like soldiers. Every nursery we visited in the Netherlands was like this, you know, you could blindly pull for a truck. If a truck came to the nursery, you know, and you were loading, you know, you could just go in there and pull the first 20 that were there. If you needed 20 of something, because they're all pretty much identical, they grow a ton of skimia at this particular nursery. And they were all, you know, in flower here, I'm sure heading out into garden centers. They just, you know, they're just absolute perfection. Every single, every single one of them, not an easy plant, not an easy plant to grow. They're basically growing them as clones. They'll tackle plants like this over there in the Netherlands is something that's slightly harder to grow, you know, prevents, you know, so much competition. Here's a variegated one, variegated skimia here. But it'll prevent some of the competition that you might see, you know, from other nurseries if you're trying to grow something that they can't grow. Not only are you growing it, but you're also have figured out, you know, absolutely how to perfect it. Tons of camellias, lots and lots of camellias, and again, marketed super interesting and, you know, pink containers for pink flowers and, you know, that kind of thing. Just a room full of them. And we've seen camellia azaleas over there, camellia azalea species. We're going to see that more in the U.S. in the coming months. Here's some, again, Japanese maples that are just marketed so well. You know, any of this material, you know, head out on a truck and go to a garden center. But I looked at this and it just kind of blew me away. The uniformity of everything, you know, the detail that goes into this and Steph and I sat at a coffee shop one morning and watched a woman selling perennials, you know, from one of these, you know, nurseries in the Netherlands on a sidewalk one Saturday morning. And just every single one of them was identical to the next. And it's just unbelievable workmanship and a lot that goes into growing in this kind of detail. So we enjoyed this. Really, really enjoyed this visit. Went out to dinner with Jim and his wife and Peter and Steph and I and really had a great time at this incredible nursery in the Netherlands. I've got a couple more of these videos upcoming, walking around some of these nurseries and showing off some of these things that are from breeders here in the Netherlands. Again, this is Camellia azalea varieties that are coming in the future. But again, we really enjoyed our visit over there and hope that you guys are enjoying some of this content as well. We hope to get back over there next year or the year after and show off some more of these amazing nurseries. Thanks for watching.