State of the Crop: Hydrangeas

Hydrangeas have become the dominant player in the flowering shrub world. Judging from what leaders in the market say, and judging from consumer demand, don’t expect this to change anytime soon.

While it seems dozens of new hydrangeas now hit the market every year, this will be the norm for at least a decade. The genus Hydrangea is highly variable with many species and traits the world’s top plant breeders have just begun to tinker with.

In Nursery Management’s first-ever State of the Crop market research project, we focused on hydrangeas. They’re simply the hottest crop on the ornamental market right now.

We asked growers how many they were growing and in what sizes. We asked what varieties they were producing and what they thought of the current hydrangea market.

It was no surprise we found hydrangea growers will produce more in 2012 than they did in 2011—an average increase of about 5 percent. And serious hydrangea growers (ones that grow more than 1,000 units per year) will produce on average almost 26,000 hydrangeas per year.

When we asked what varieties hydrangea growers plan to produce, we received 163 different responses.

So the market for hydrangeas is enormous, and there’s good reason for that.

Why the popularity?
Tom Foley, supply chain manager at Ball Horticultural Co., has seen his company jump feet first into the hydrangea market. A recent Ball release, Hydrangea paniculata Bombshell is quickly becoming one of the top cultivars on the market.

‘Nikko Blue’ remains one of the most popular macrophyllas, being produced by about one in four hydrangea growers.

“There are three good reasons why hydrangeas are so popular,” Foley said. “They’re well known in the gardening public. People are accustomed to hydrangeas and know how to work with them and be successful with them. It comes down to ease of product use at the consumer level.

“Secondly, they bloom in a time of year when people are purchasing plants—May, June and July. With paniculatas, you still have color in the fall when people are coming back into the garden centers.

“Third, there’s a lot of breeding going on for three distinct hydrangea markets: For garden use, as a potted crop for a gift product, and for cut flowers.”

There is just too much going for hydrangeas for their popularity to wane, Foley said.

“There’s enough breeding occurring now that we can selectively choose varieties that are going to be good for the grower, good for the retailer and good for the homeowner. I just don’t see the popularity of hydrangeas dying down anytime soon,” Foley said.

Tim Wood is product development and marketing manager at Spring Meadow Nursery/Proven Winners ColorChoice. His company has released many of the most popular new cultivars on the market including Limelight, Quick Fire, Incrediball and Invincibelle Spirit. All were in the Top 10 among varieties being produced by growers in 2012.
 

He sees hydrangeas as a plant that resonates with most North American gardening consumers.

“Hydrangeas are a group that you can equate with roses,” Wood said. “They aren’t going away. Everyone is familiar with them. Even people that don’t garden know hydrangeas. It’s just a huge, staple plant.

“This segment of the market is just going to get better and better. People want color. People know and are familiar with hydrangeas. A big part of the country can grow them.”

It helps that many well-known gardening celebrities have actively promoted hydrangeas.

“Martha Stewart has been banging the hydrangea drum now for probably 20 years, and that has certainly helped. Now there are people out there like P. Allen Smith really trying to promote them as well,” said Pat Bailey, Bailey Nurseries vice president of marketing and administration.
 

Bombshell, above, is a new paniculata with a tight form, reaching just 3 feet tall at maturity.

Getting the ball rolling
Bailey Nurseries’ H. macrophylla Endless Summer gets much credit for creating a buzz in the hydrangea market when it was released in 2004. It was the first reblooming macrophylla released, and was backed with a major promotional campaign.

“What did Endless Summer do? It refocused and reinvigorated the category of macrophylla. It was a significant game changer for the industry,” Foley said. “In the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, macrophyllas were sold, but consumers didn’t know they could have a reblooming macrophylla.”

Wood agrees, and he thinks breeders will only improve hydrangeas—macrophyllas and other species included—from here.

“Endless Summer was a real game changer of a plant. With its remontant, reblooming nature, that changed everything. And we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. We’re going to see a lot of improvement with remontant macrophyllas from here,” Wood said.

Future new hydrangea varieties will be so appealing and have such great new traits, that they will take over the market.

“Just look at that species alone. There are 250 or more macrophylla cutlivars out there, but most aren’t rebloomers. Now with the remontant types, pretty much a handful of plants have replaced 200-300 cultivars on the market. You can count on that happening again,” Wood said.

Changing the majors
In addition to their popularity, the great diversity in the genus Hydrangea is what attracts the world’s top plant breeders to work with this plant, said Geoff Needham, owner of PlantHaven. His company has released H. macrophylla ‘Zorro,’ which is new in the United States, but has developed a good following in Europe.

‘Zorro’ is a sturdy, compact lacecap with black stems that hold flowers upright. When grown with blue flowers, the contrast between stem and blossom color is striking.
 

“The diversity of the genus is just phenomenal. Look at all the species and forms—groundcovers, climbers, trees, fall color,” Needham said. “There are rare species and related genera that people have just started experimenting with. Breeders are having a field day.”

He expects to see breeders soon releasing many new varieties with bicolor flowers, more double-flowered varieties and cultivars with better reds and yellows.

For now, the best trait to add to new macrophylla varieties is stem hardiness, Wood said.

“We need bud hardiness, and something that reliably flowers in the North,” Wood said. “Even with remontant flowering, it’s still going to flower but very late in the year. If we breed more bud hardiness, that’s going to make a huge difference.”

For paniculata and arborescens varieties, the key to breeding could be to make them more like macrophylla types.

“Paniculatas are great because you can grow them in Minnesota and you can grow them in Orlando, Fla.,” Wood said. “They grow in about any soil, any climate. In South Florida or South Texas they’re not a good plant, but it grows pretty much everywhere else.”

But their drawback is that the species grows very large, and it has a limited range of flower color. They emerge white (sometimes chartreuse) and usually fade to a brown (sometimes reds, pinks or maroons). Nonetheless, you’re not going to see the pink or blue hues of a macrophylla.

“You’d love to see paniculatas with different, exotic flower colors, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. But there’s a lot of improvement we can see with creating arborescens and paniculatas with a more compact natures, maybe a few more color choices, and have them shorter and showier,” Wood said.

H. paniculata Limelight, a Proven Winners/ColorChoice variety, has become the top-grown hydrangea cultivar in the country, according to the Nursery Management survey. Bred in Holland, it has green/chartreuse flowers that change to pink in fall.

Hydrangeas are in bloom in May, June and July—peak times for garden retailers.

Another recent Proven Winners hydrangea, Little Lime, is a dwarf form of Limelight, reaching just 5 feet at maturity vs. possibly 8 feet with Limelight.

For oakleaf hydrangeas, another major category, the biggest goal with breeders is to create varieties that will look good in No. 3 containers. The species typically is floppy and spindly in pots, and improving that could greatly improve the plant’s appearance in retail locations.

Both Ice Crystal from Ball and Pee Wee from Monrovia, are two H. quercifolia varieties that are improvements on the species.

Too many at once
But with all the cultivars being released, it’s a lot for the market to digest. For that reason, some good new plants are going to fall through the cracks.

“When a genus goes crazy like this, breeders pile on en masse and it’s hard to keep up. Years go by and a plant of real merit is found that was somehow just not picked up by the industry. We just couldn’t digest all the new varieties with a new one hitting the market every two weeks,” Needham said.

“Breeders are going to keep producing more and more. There are some great ones, there are probably some poor ones, and there are going to be sleepers that we probably won’t know much about until years down the line.”
 

Predictability is key
With more growers attempting just-in-time delivery to retailers, predictability is key. Much like the floriculture market, more nurseries are attempting to schedule production so that all crops are delivered right at the peak of color.

And this predictability will be the key to any new hydrangea cultivar, Foley said.

“You want it to root readily and be programmable. If you stick cuttings one week, you know they’re going to be rooted in so many weeks. If you pot it on this week, you know it’s going to be blooming this week,” Foley said. “Look at macrophyllas. Mother’s day is huge for them. Everybody wants a big, beautiful, blooming hydrangea for mom. When we breed cultivars that are programmable, then this is much easier to achieve.

“There are so many colors, shapes, forms and foliage colors—a fantastic range of ornamental traits available and breeders are going to do some fantastic things. But programmability is a premium trait in my mind.”

With this in mind, Ball released Bombshell for its programmability.

“It’s easy to root. It’s easy for the grower. It really only needs one prune a year, in winter, so growers are saving a lot of labor and costs associated with that. It blooms in June, which is a big bonus for retailers. So we think it’s a great all-around plant,” Foley said.

For more: Ball Horticultural, www.ballhort.com; Spring Meadow Nursery, www.springmeadownursery.com; Bailey Nurseries, www.baileynurseries.com; PlantHaven, www.planthaven.com.

The creation of a ‘game changer’

When Bailey Nurseries introduced Hydrangea macrophylla Endless Summer in 2004, it was the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off in the hydrangea market.

Never before had a reblooming macrophylla been introduced to the public. Never before had a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign accompanied a new hydrangea release. Never before had consumers across the nation clamored to garden centers asking for a new hydrangea variety by name.

It was a success for every link of the supply chain—propagators, growers and retailers—who all charged premiums for the product, which was passed down to consumers who gladly paid extra to get their hands on Endless Summer plants.

But how did it come about? It started as a plant in the Bailey Nurseries trial gardens, like thousands of other plants under evaluation at any given time.

“We had it under observation for about 10 years,” said Pat Bailey, Bailey Nurseries vice president of marketing and administration.

In the late 1990s, they were visited by Michael Dirr, Nursery Management contributing editor and retired University of Georgia professor. Dirr had been searching for decades for a H. macrophylla that would flower on new growth (remontant blooming). This trait meant that they plant would bloom throughout the summer and, in northern climates, it could bloom every year even if it died down to the ground in winter.

“He saw it in our trial gardens and got really excited about it. He pointed out that it looked like it was a remontant bloomer. We did some more research on it and thought we might be onto something, so we sent it to a few other growers around the country to try it out.”

Eventually, the company decided that the plant was worthy of a massive promotional effort that would involve multiple nurseries to produce the plants.

In 2002 a marketing firm was used to create an entire program, including naming the plant Endless Summer, and creating the plant’s signature blue pots, which are still in use 10 years later.

“We originally chose 15 growers and decided we needed 1 million plants for the soft release in 2004,” Bailey said. “The first year they were available only through independent garden centers, and the following year we released them to the box stores.”

The company spent more than $1 million in consumer advertising in 2004, including ads in Better Homes & Gardens, Southern Living and Sunset magazines. Every year since then the company continues to spend between $1 million and $1.5 million in advertising to get the Endless Summer name in front of the gardening public.

As it turns out, 1 million plants in 2004 was not nearly enough.

“It caught on like wildfire,” Bailey said. “With the P.R., the advertising and Dr. Dirr talking about it, we were able to create a huge buzz. We caught a lot of great press, and that 1 million plants sold through really quickly.”

In fact, some credit the lack of supply as a factor that helped spur more demand. Not having Endless Summer available made some gardeners want it even more.

“I think it certainly helped. With new plants, it’s always tricky. Sometimes you release something and the first year you’re asking, ‘How am I going to get rid of all these things?’ Sometimes you don’t have nearly enough. But it did help and it kept the price up,” Bailey said.

The continued advertising has made Endless Summer a recognized name brand, amongst the gardening public and the landscape trade. But Bailey sees room to grow and market share to gain.

“We’ve done our own market research and learned the brand is still pretty new on the curve,” Bailey said. “There are a large number of households out there that do not have Endless Summer planted. So we’ve just scratched the surface. We’re nowhere near the saturation point yet.”