Among new plants for next year, a few are stars

There’s a high bar for newly introduced plants. It’s not enough for them to be just good. They have to be superior to the thousands of plants already on the market or offer something different than what’s already available.

And like most years, I can say that of the new plants I’ve been growing this year, many are pretty good, a few are disappointing and only a handful have surpassed that bar of being must-grow plants.

I didn’t realize that the world needed more sweet potato vines, but every year a few new varieties are released, and interestingly some of them come out of the North Carolina State University Sweetpotato and Genetics Program. NC State’s program is breeding for excellent sweet potatoes for crops, but occasionally they end up with plants that are lousy at producing tubers but have interesting foliage. Plant brand Proven Winners buys the genetics for these “breeding failures” when they show promising aspects of ornamental plants.

That partnership produced two new introductions that will be out next year but I’ve had a chance to grow this year. The first is Sweet Caroline Medusa Black, which features deeply lobed palm-shaped leaves with a great mounding habit. I’ve been growing it in both a pot and the ground, and my only complaint is that, like a lot of sweet potato vines, it’s vigorous enough to require pruning every few weeks.

Sweet Caroline Sweetheart Shadowstorm, on the other hand, has been well behaved. It has spade-shaped black leaves that have green variegation, which gives it a more interesting look than many on the market.

On the floral side of things, a new Calibrachoa for next year has turned out to be a great performer. Superbells Magic Double Grapefruit is a color changing variety that varies from yellow to medium pink. Calibrachoa breeding has come a long way from poor performing varieties, and this new variety, which mounds up beautifully and holds its own in a pot, is a testament to the progress.

Petunia lovers always have new varieties to choose from, and one of the better new releases is a new color in the Easy Wave line called Pink Pearl. This line is bred to be more mounding than the original Wave petunias, so it works well in containers and the garden.

There is always room on the market and in the garden for a new garden-sized dahlia, and Dahlia Venti PinkBurst is one of the best to show up recently. The anemone-type dahlia grows about 18 inches tall, meaning it needs no staking, and its deep pink centers fade to coral with a single row of pink petals surrounding it. 

The best new vegetable I grew this year, was the Capeliente pepper, which is a jalapeño that produces 3 to 4-inch fruits that, so far, have been milder than a regular jalapeño but produce in just 60 to 70 days and grow on small plants no taller than 18 inches.

There’s lots of time to enjoy this year’s garden, but its not too soon to start planning for some exceptional new varieties to grow next year.