Outside

     The brainchild of the Virginia Nursery & Landscape Association (VNLA) and Virginia Tech’s Horticulture Department, Beautiful Gardens got started five years ago when five plant “evaluation sites” were established across Virginia for the testing of new plant cultivars. Now the program’s first offerings have hit the market—nine Virginia-grown and Virginia-tested ornamental trees, shrubs and perennials ready for planting, among them the Green Velvet boxwood, the Snowflake oakleaf hydrangea, and a Chinese redbud named Don Egolf (see the full list in the sidebar). “The plants selected for 2009 are all exceptional but underutilized in the home landscape,” explains Doug Hensel, Beautiful Gardens’ chairman and president of Great Big Greenhouse in Richmond.

     Virginia’s innovative plant program is not the first of its kind. A handful of other states, including Texas, Arkansas and Georgia, have similar ventures, and there is also a commercial enterprise called Proven Winners that’s been launched by a trio of plant propagation companies. But Rumen Conev, executive director of Beautiful Gardens and a professor at Virginia Tech, asserts that Virginia’s program is in a category all its own. “What makes us unique,” Conev says, “is the broadness of a partnership that includes industry, academia, botanic gardens, state government and the wide, supportive base from the Virginia Master Gardener volunteers. Master Gardener volunteers and Virginia Tech specialists are currently testing more than 100 plants, including nine plants already selected for 2010.”

     To be sure, there is no shortage of participants. In addition to Virginia Tech’s Horticulture Department and the VNLA—the green industry trade group comprising garden centers, nursery growers, landscapers, installation contractors, greenhouses and horticultural suppliers—other Beautiful Gardens partners include the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS), J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Claytor Nature Study Center at Lynchburg College, and Norfolk Botanical Garden. VDACS is providing the marketing muscle that has made Virginia’s Finest such a desirable appellation. Yet another partner, the Danville-based Institute for Sustainable and Renewable Resources (ISRR), is collaborating with VT experts in an attempt to foster the green industry by improved propagation techniques.

     Meantime, the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research, the ISRR’s parent organization, is currently working to spin off a commercial tissue culture propagation lab. Such a facility would be a tremendous boon to Virginia’s horticultural industry, allowing breeders to work with an in-state lab. Two promising ISRR/VT horticulture projects are the development of more vigorous, longer-blooming triploid daylilies and propagation of native azaleas. Members of daylily and rhododendron societies are contributing to those efforts.