New Arrivals : Four Flowers to Look for at Your Nursery

Every planting season brings old, familiar faces back to the nursery shelves. Right now, you’ll find Iceland poppies and calendulas, and snapdragons and stock that you haven’t seen in six months, among the many other fall-planted regulars.

What I look forward to especially, though, are the fresh faces. But because nurseries simply set the new out with the old, you must search to discover these newcomers.

With just a little scouting, I managed to find a few, including a “pink” pansy. Of course, it’s not a true pink; it’s a very light lavender, drawing not from red, which isn’t present in pansies, but from the blue and purple pansy colors. But it’s pink enough to go with other pink and red flowers, which tend to clash with the orange and yellow and violet-blue of most pansies. You can, for instance, plant pink pansies at the base of red or pink roses, which makes a very pretty foundation for the leggy bushes, carrying the flowers’ color to the ground.

If you’ve got a lot of shade in your garden, you’ll want to watch for several new obconicas, which are rapidly becoming Southern California’s favorite primrose; they make three times the show of the dainty fairy primroses, and 10 times that of the prim and proper English or Pacific primroses. They’re bigger plants with bigger flowers on bigger clusters, and they bloom so often and so heavily that they are a mass of color all winter and spring. The additional colors are refreshingly subtle and soft.

A perennial that is just now appearing at the nurseries but an old friend to some of us (we’ve been passing around divisions for years) is Verbena rigida . I would vote it one of the most valuable players in my garden. “Rigida” probably refers to the very stiff, short stems (12 to 18 inches tall), each of which has only a few stiff-toothed leaves but ends in a spire of truly purple flowers. If you have a hard time deciding how purple, violet and lavender differ, remember that V . rigida is the very definition of purple. From there you’ll note that most other so-called purple flowers are violet or lavender.

V. rigida is always in flower, but when an individual stem finishes blooming, it must be cut to the ground and the others will continue the show.

I’ve heard some plants described as preferring poor soil or bad locations in the garden, but all of my plants like to grow where the living is easy--all except this little verbena. It’s a strong spreader, sending out long, white, root-like rhizomes that then send up spikes. It would be a pest if it weren’t so easy to pull out of where it’s not wanted (it’s shallow-rooted) and if it headed for the good soil like other plants. But this one really seeks out the odd spots, preferring to grow in the cracks between paving stones or up through gravel, even flowering in cracks in the driveway. It’s one tough plant.

Delphiniums are usually thought of as perennials, with larkspur being the annuals (though both are grown as annuals in Southern California), but I’ve found a delphinium, Blue Elf, that is half-and-half. Most of the flowers in this strain that I’ve seen are a rare, deep dark blue or violet. Blue Elf grows only 16 to 18 inches tall, and the leaves look like those of a wild California delphinium--deeply cut like snowflakes. Though the plant tag will tell you to space them 15 inches apart, plant them 8 to 10 inches apart; they’re rather thin plants. Like all delphiniums they like a rich, well-drained soil.

Those are my big finds for this season. But I know there are others out there, hiding among the flats of other fall-planted flowers.