Meet the 2022 Plants of the Year 🌿

well hi everybody so are you getting excited about gardening if you're this year like i am i am very excited about it as i think you can tell one of the things that i really like to do at this time of year is take a look at the plants of the year program for this coming year these are programs that are done by either organizations or sometimes brands and these are featuring plants that are tried and true things these are things that they know will grow well and have merit in some way which is why they are being featured now this differs from new plants for the year which you've probably read some articles about them or seen some videos about some of the plants that are coming out this year and those are new and exciting and don't get me wrong i clamor for those as much as you do but one of the things that's kind of nice about these plants of the year program is that there are a few aspects of this that you know make it a little bit more approachable than some of those new plants one is availability these plants of the year programs these are typically decided upon a couple of years in advance so growers have plenty of time to get their growing and their production up so if a plant is featured as a plant of the year typically you shouldn't really have a hard time finding it they make it a point to let growers know this so they can ramp up there's also a lot more information about these plants out there there is sort of a informational educational element that these groups and organizations make it a point to push out there so it'll be very easy for you to find out more information about these or learn more about some of these plants and really the best thing about these is again going back to the tried and true thing there's a reason these plants are chosen and because of that uh you know you have a better chance of more people knowing about it more people having had grown this in the past and that means you're probably going to have success with it too because there's a lot of knowledge out there so i'm not sure if i found all of the plans of the year that various organizations do and i'm certainly not going to feature all of them here but i am going to feature ones that are particularly interesting to me and hopefully to you and we're going to start with sort of the granddaddy of them all at least in my opinion and that is the perennial plant association's pick now the perennial plant association is made up of a wide array of people who work in the plant industry and so this is growers and garden center owners and breeders and designers and garden writers and a large variety of people but generally people who spend a lot of time looking for really good plants their membership votes on this several years ahead of time and here's the criteria this is why i think this in particular this one is one to pay attention to so here's why i think the perennial plant association's pick is always interesting because the criteria for something to be a plant of the year is pretty tough so it needs to be suitable to a wide variety of climates needs to be low maintenance be relatively pest and disease resistant has to be readily available in the year that it's being promoted hence why this is voted on a couple of years ago and then it needs to offer multiple seasons of interest you can't be a one-trick pony and think that it's going to become a perennial of the year so this year's plant of the year is shazacryams caparium also known as little bluestem and then they they add in all of its cultivars underneath that along with the species now this is a fabulous grass it has multiple seasons of interest some of them have very blue foliage it's a generally an upright thing it gets these beautiful sort of wispy flowers in it if you leave it standing for winter it has great winter interest it's really a fabulous one and an easy grass to incorporate into your gardens it's not something that's going to take over the world like some grasses can it's very well behaved now little blue stem is actually native to a large portion of north america which is great an added benefit that it's native in many of our locations and it's one of these plants this is a grass that you don't have to limit to just a sort of planting where you would anticipate grasses being grown this will work in well into your perennial borders now i'm going to put a link in the description to the perennial plant association's website and that's where they have specific cultivars recommended for different areas but a couple of them that i think are worth noting are one is is one called jazz now jazz is nice because if you've grown the blues it's jazz is shorter than that this is about 36 inches tall which is a very approachable height for a grass for incorporating in many gardens and it has this kind of silver blue foliage on it one that i do have in my garden i think i have three of them maybe maybe even more in my garden is standing ovation now standing ovation is interesting because it gets a wide variety of colors including purples and blues all mixed in it it also is said to stand up better to fertile soils now a lot of times if you run into a situation with a grass where a grass gets really floppy on you and you're like what happened here it's not supposed to be floppy a lot of times that's because you're dealing with overly fertile soil so if especially if you're incorporating this into a main garden where perhaps you're looking for fertile soil particularly fertile soil for some of your other plants standing ovation might be a good one to look at because it'll still stay upright even if it's growing in fairly rich soil now we move on to proven winners plants of the year now proven winners program picks their own proven winners plants in a variety of categories and i'm not going to go through all the categories here but the really nice thing about this is that you know that proven winners is going to be pushing these plants out to their garden centers so if you like any of these you should not have a hard time finding them the first one is the annual of the year and their annual of the year this year is prince tut papyrus grass now this has been out for a long time i've grown it it's a fabulous little uh it's not little it's a fabulous plant if you've grown king tut papyrus which many of us have which is a fabulous thriller in a container or in the ground that gets to be like four or five feet tall prince tut is significantly shorter than that and you see less stem it's more about kind of the feathery foliage on it this is probably going to top out at about 30 inches they say 18 to 30 inches tall i would say when i've grown it's gotten all of you know i would say it's definitely gone up to two feet 30 inches something somewhere in that range this is a great one the only thing i would say about this and it works by the way it works so well in containers certainly you can grow it in the ground but it's really i think at its best in containers and what's nice about it again is that kind of feathery foliage that it has which is a really nice texture contrast to many of the other plants that that we grow now keep in mind that papyrus is generally a water plant so it will appreciate moist soil but what's nice is that this has been bred to be able to coexist in a container with things like your supertunias or things like that now i probably wouldn't put this in a container with super bells because those like to sort of dry out a little bit between waterings and this is going to like that consistent moisture so i don't think you have to go overboard on watering this however your size will be dictated to a certain extent by the amount of water it's getting so just keep that in mind now proven winners perennial of the year is a paint the town magenta dianthus i have to admit to not being a huge fan of dianthus but the new dianeses that are out there are much better they um they just keep blooming they don't need to be they don't look so ratty when you when they're sort of half finished blooming and i will say that there are some containers that were made with this i believe in the town of holland michigan if i'm not mistaken that i've seen i think on walters gardens instagram page i'll see if i can find that picture for you spring containers and they are just spectacular in that so if you like dianthus this is a good one to try their flowering shrub of the year is double play doozy spirea now i have not grown this particular spirea but i've grown some of the other spireas that are in their double play series and they are really fabulous if your opinion of spirea is sort of the plant that was in every big box store parking lot or at the foundation of every sort of builder landscape that was included with the building of the house right along with like a stelladoro daylily or something change your mind about spirits because they've gotten a lot better so this one is one that blooms either reblooms or will bloom consistently throughout the year and i have personally found that to be true this one doozy has a really bright uh fun pink color on it with kind of a darker green leaf it should stand out really really lovely spirea are also deer resistant i personally have had no issues with your brows on my spirea your deer may vary but generally speaking they are deer resistant and it's just a very very easy plant to grow it's just kind of if you are looking for shrubs that you um because you're wanting to kind of make your landscaping a little bit more low maintenance or you're looking to add more low maintenance things so you can focus on other areas of your garden aspiria and this one in particular would be a good call for that garden height for this is only tops out at 36 inches so it's a very manageable size to tuck in now we all know that proven winners has great hydrangeas and so of course they have a hydrangea of the year and this year that is little quick fire and i'm going to tell you guys we are all taken with the limelights and the new ones that come out and um little lime and all these other things but i'm telling you we're all sleeping on this quickfire series they are particularly good panicle hydrangeas i like them because they aren't quite as dense the flowers are not as dense as a limelight you know with a limelight flower like there is no space between those flowers this is a little lacier and a little lighter and doesn't physically take up as much room and of course the quickfire series what that references is that they turn red early so you get that great pink color it's not a bright pink it's a very nice kind of rosy pink that they get early on it earlier in the season i grow a little quick fire and regular quick fire and i wish i had more of them they're fabulous plants so a little quick fire is fairly little when we're talking about hydrangeas it's three to five feet tall and wide um it wants at least part sun to sun this is not a shade hydrangea that you're looking for um this of course blooms on new wood which is fabulous in particular if you live in an area with deer if you can keep the deer from eating the flowers off during the summer and spring in winter it doesn't matter so much because they will bloom on new wood this is hearty in zones three through eight and i think this is one that would do really well in a large container if you're looking for a hydrangea for a container this could be a good one for you excuse me now the national garden bureau does their plant of the year program slightly differently in that they don't name specific plants they choose categories of plants and they have a lot of them including this year they've added a house plant version on there which is peperomia which i have no experience with and i will not be talking to you with about today but they have some other really good ones so their vegetable of the year is salad greens and i can't tell you how much i wholeheartedly endorse this i believe that everybody should be growing salad greens you can grow them in containers in the ground in a raised bed doesn't matter where you can grow them if you don't have a lot of sun they don't have to be in full sun in fact they appreciate a little bit of protection and they're pennies just absolutely pennies for loads of salad greens i would highly recommend that everybody give these a shot because once you taste homegrown salad greens you wonder what in the world you've been buying the stuff at the store for it is one of those things much like a homegrown tomato that has very little in relationship to what you can buy in the store this is always the vegetable that i tell people to start with if they've never grown a single vegetable before in their life i feel like they should start with salad greens and i'm so glad that the national garden bureau is promoted bureau is promoting that this year their pick for annual of the year this year is verbena and i'm pretty happy about this one too because i do love verbenas i've been growing so many different kinds of verbena now when you think about sort of the hybrid type that's been bred that kind of trails out of containers my number one pick for that is proven winners royale peachy keen almost every year you will find that my garden i also like some of their blue varieties from that same series those powerful pound there is a lot of bloom for those and they just keep going but that peachy keen in particular is a very true peach color it's not coral it's not something else it's peach and it's beautiful of course there are other verbenas that i also like to grow um some of the verbena banariensis varieties are really interesting all the species of course can get quite tall probably four to five feet i think it's a great tall plant to work into your garden at the front of the border to get some variation in your heights and it's kind of an easy plant for that to happen do beware with it it can be almost an aggressive reseeder in some areas in our area it is it barely recedes so it's not an issue but i think once you get to certainly zone seven and up and maybe even zone six you do have to be a little wary of the receding issue i don't find it a big deal to pick out what i don't want that's reseeded but i think it's worth noting that and some people have moved away from it because of that receding issue now there are some hybrids of that which are generally sterile so that's great now proven winners has another one of those called meteor shower there's a new one coming out i think it's proven winners called cake pops there's another one out there called lollipop they all have this same general concept which is you know skinny stem purple lilac kind of lollipop type ball on the top really fun for containers that's my favorite place to use them there are other verbenas like verbena aficionalis bampton uh re-seeded in my garden last year could not find seeds for it this year so they've been sold out at select seeds which is the place where i usually find them i'm hoping it reseeds again next year really interesting airy plant think of wiry stems with tiny tiny tiny little kind of elongated stems with little flowers on them exceptionally difficult to take a decent picture of because it's so wiry because it just the camera wants to focus on whatever is behind it so hard one to take pictures of but worth growing so many good verbenas out there highly recommend if you haven't dabbled in verbenas before this could be a really good year to do that their perennial of the year is flocks i mean phlox is a garden classic right it's also native to much of north america so it's got that going for it and um phlox is just there's so many out there now if you've grown flocks in the past you may be like old-time flocks there's a lot of issues with powdery mildew on those a lot of what is happening in phlox is being bred to be disease resistant so that's not as big of a problem i would say definitely look for some of those new varieties that are coming out that really have that mildew resistance it'll save you a lot of trouble they do tend to be a favorite among the deer so i make sure to keep on the deer repellent spray with the flocks because they do have a habit of coming along right when they're about to get really good at nipping them right off now keep in mind there's also um sort of a ground cover flocks flax subulata there's a lot of those out there too also being bred for better disease resistance and a better color you can get pretty amazing color on on phlox in fact i just shared a picture recently from my mom's garden she's got a flocks i don't know what it is it is she's had it for in her garden for many years so it's kind of an older variety this is a sort of eyeball searing pink it is really bright but there's beautiful whites there's beautiful blues you can't go wrong with a few flocks in your garden as long as you're willing to manage that deer situation if that's something you deal with and the last one i wanted to talk about is actually a new plant of the year program that i found i mean i don't know if it's new but i've never heard of it before this one is done by the state botanical garden of georgia they choose four pollinator plants they have pollinator plants of the year one for each season and i wanted to just highlight their summer choice which is pygmanthemums this is mountain mint there are many different varieties of mountain mints all of which are great for pollinators you won't beat it for a pollinator plant it is covered in all sorts of pollinators all year long it's also fabulous for cut flowers it has a really interesting i mean this is not a flower that's gonna blow you away but it's very interesting and it's a great accent in a in a vase and it has a kind of a silvery blue color to the leaves so it's a great way to work in there now mint it's not truly a mint but it's in that family should give you a little bit of an idea of what it can do which is that it can spread this is not something that will take over your world but i think you should plant it with an eye towards giving it room to grow don't expect to keep this thing in a two or three foot area plant it somewhere where you're gonna allow it to meander a little bit and i promise you you won't regret it because it's worth every bit of area it might take up and it works so well with other plants most of this pygmanthemums want full sun to part sun you can certainly push it into parts on they want good drainage adequate moisture but honestly they're not that fuzzy they're once they get established they're gonna go mine gets about three feet tall some can get a little taller a little shorter than that i think three feet tall is probably the average and i love having it i've moved it around the garden quite a bit because i like it that much okay so those are some plants to be looking out for this year you'll probably be hearing a lot more about them you will probably see many of them in garden centers but these are all plants that lots of people have grown and grown successfully so you should feel comfortable investing in these plants and looking into these because there's a lot of great ones out there to discover so if you enjoyed this video and you found it helpful i would really love it if you gave it a like it really does help the channel and i so appreciate it in the meantime hope you guys are having a great day planning your garden for next year i'm really enjoying it we'll see you soon [Music] foreign

Channel: The Impatient Gardener

Views: 35,284

Keywords: plants of the year 2022, proven winners, prince tut papyrus, graceful grasses, verbena, little quick fire hydrangea, spirea double play doozie, dianthus paint the town, hosta, pycnanthemum, national garden bureau, perennial plant association, little bluestem, schizachryium scoparium

Id: CvaYTZ8Xgq8

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 02 2022