What's on the horizon for gardeners in 2012? Here are 10 plant, design and ideology trends to watch out for this year.
1 Shades of orange flowers and foliage
Orange has been pronounced the hue of the year by colour industry giant Pantone. This hot colour is echoed in some of the newest perennial cultivars: Baptisia Cherries Jubilee (in the Decadence series); Hemerocallis Primal Scream; Echinacea Flame Thrower; as well as Heuchera Delta Dawn and others.
2 Breakthroughs in blue
In the past 10 years, the most prominently featured colour in the Perennial Plant Association's Plant of the Year has been blue (Amsonia, Baptisia, Geranium Roxanne, Nepeta Walker's Low), reflecting our love of this hue. This is great news since blue is a colour complement to orange. The plant breeders Florigene and Suntory have broken ground by introducing the new rose cultivar Applause – which is truly more like a dusky purple than a true blue – by inserting the socalled blue gene found in pansies into a Cardinal de Richelieu rose. So far only available to the cut-flower industry (since November), this "blue" rose may make its way soon into plant nurseries.
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