Joy Creek Plant Introductions from 2005

The year 2005 brought five introductions to our catalogue. We will describe only two of them in this issue.

Over the years, we have been frustrated by seed crops of yarrow which have produced inconsistent plants. We have long looked for a seedling Achillea that had good flower color that held up for a long time in the summer garden. We eventually found such a plant in a seedling from Achillea ‘Paprika’ which we gave the working name Achillea ‘Paprika Joy Creek Select.' The name, although it is not very fanciful, represents our selection process. The rich red flowers with yellow eyes are gathered into flattened heads. If bloom spikes are cut back, it will continue to bloom all summer. As with other yarrows, the flowers do fade but not quickly and not unattractively.

In our gardens, we have towering Euphorbia characias var. wulfenii that make a glorious display from spring to early autumn. They are so large that they sometimes lean on their neighbors and we have had to cage them to keep them upright. Not every garden can handle such large plants and so we set to work to find a seedling that was shorter and more compact but offered the same bold, bracted flower-heads in spring. Once again, we chose a not too imaginative working name, ‘Joy Creek Dwarf’, and that name has stuck as a description. At three feet tall and three feet wide, our selection can easily be accommodated in almost any garden. In habit, it is upright and does not flop. In addition, it has mid-sized, somewhat rounded floral-heads.

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