More Joy Creek Plant Introductions

One fact that many customers do not know about Joy Creek Nursery is that we are always finding new and interesting variations of plants in our gardens. Sometimes these prove to be of great interest and we test and evaluate them in hopes of finding a worthy new introduction. To date, we have released 27 plants and have several more in the evaluation stage.

As part of our Joy Creek Times, we thought we would reintroduce our plants a few of at a time and give a little of the history of their development. Penstemons were the very first plants we selected to introduce as our own.

Our collection of garden hybrid penstemon is one of the most popular at the nursery. These colorful plants bloom from the summer into the fall. Their tubular flowers range from white to pink, rose, red, blue and purple. Because they are evergreen shrublets, they are valuable additions to the mixed border.

In 1994, we discovered a seedling that was intermediary between two familiar cultivars, Penstemon ‘Midnight Blue’ and ‘Stapleford Gem.' It proved to be vigorous and free-flowering. The mid-sized, light purple blue flowers have dark maroon stripes in their throats which gave rise to the name ‘Purple Tiger’. We released it in 1996 along with another seedling we had discovered that had enormous lavender-purple flowers with dark raspberry streaks in their pure white throats. We called this one ‘Raspberry Flair.' (Photo at left above)

In the mid-1990’s, we began selecting seedlings that had pure white throats and tinted lips. The first in the series of selections was a lovely violet-lipped form, which we named ‘Violet Kissed’. This was joined by pale coral pink-lipped ‘Coral Kissed’ and bright rose-lipped ‘Cerise Kissed’. The following year we introduced ‘Wine Kissed’ (Photo at right above) which is the most dramatic of the four with its white throat and wine red lips. All have been popular with our customers. Recently the series was featured by the wholesale nursery, Sunny Border Nursery, as part of their temp-perennial collection.

The latest addition to our penstemon introductions almost ended up on the compost pile as we were rooting out stray seedlings. Fortunately, it was spared. ‘Raspberry Wine’ (Photo above) is a cross between ‘Raspberry Flair’ and ‘Wine Kissed.' The flowers are the largest we have seen on a garden penstemon. The depth of color is close to that of ‘Wine Kissed,' however, the throat is not white but streaked in raspberry very much like ‘Raspberry Flair.'

We are now at work on a series of new penstemon crosses and hope to be trialing our seedlings in the coming year.

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Photos: Joy Creek Photo Archive © all rights reserved