Ornamental Breeder: What is your role as production manager? Do you select the plants?
Bill Peters: Once a landscape construction job is sold, I do all of the purchasing, all of the scheduling and then schedule my crews to go out. Then I make sure that the quality control is right and all the standards are being met. We also have another division, Constant Care, where we maintain several high-end clients’ landscapes all year. I oversee that and make sure that all the quality standards are being met there.
OB: How were you introduced to SunPatiens?
BP: We’ve always used impatiens, and we do major mass plantings of annuals. We started phasing out normal impatiens because of downy mildew, and we were also looking for something that could handle the sun better. Two years ago, I was vacationing in Florida and I saw a mass planting. I didn’t know what they were.
I asked somebody, and they said they were SunPatiens. I found out more about them from our plant grower broker, and we ran a trial. We took about a quarter of our impatiens sites and switched them out to SunPatiens, and they just performed really well. Now that’s all we use in lieu of traditional impatiens.
OB: You mentioned that you have benefitted from the disease resistance. I imagine that before you discovered SunPatiens, downy mildew impacted your business greatly.
BP: We’ve been planting impatiens for these customers for years, and when we had to tell them that first year that we couldn’t do impatiens, we had a lot of customers who were really upset. When we were able to introduce SunPatiens and give them that exact look they wanted, they were all happy again.
OB: How many SunPatiens do you plant each year?
BP: We plant about 12,000 to 13,000 SunPatiens a year.
OB: Which series do you use the most: Compact, Spreading or Vigorous?
BP: We’re pretty much using Compact exclusively.
OB: For both landscape and container plantings?
BP: Yes, and they do well in containers with palms, bananas, ferns and crotons. They do not get too big. What’s interesting is we can use them as mass plantings in a garden, and they’ll get really big, but if I put them in a container, they don’t overtake the container. It’s like they know their limitations.
OB: What are some of the other benefits of using SunPatiens?
BP: They just give that really, really good mass of color, and they don’t burn. They’re stable. They’re also very resilient. In one site, they got fairly tall, and a wind storm came and some of them fell over, and there was a hole in the middle of a mass planting. The next day, they were back up. And we use three SunPatiens where we would have used six impatiens.
OB: One of your large Constant Care projects using SunPatiens was for Miami Valley Hospital’s Jayne Emoff Miller Garden of Hope. Why did you decide to use SunPatiens for this project?
BP: The first year we used verbenas, and it didn’t work well. SunPatiens are not picky other than needing water. There are other species that if they dry out, they’ll defoliate and get really nasty looking and then you have to cut them back. Or, if they get too hot, they’ll blister and lose their blooms. SunPatiens are lot more resilient, which is why we decided to try them. The three steel arches start on the ground and arch up about 15 feet in the air. There’s another 30 to 50 feet of SunPatiens which run on the ground. When you’re looking down from the 6th floor of the hospital, you see three bands of color that are 5 feet wide and anywhere from 70 to 100 feet long. It’s a harsh space, and there isn’t any shade, so it’s not the most ideal conditions for tender annuals, and SunPatiens just really performed well, as you can see.
OB: What have you heard from people about SunPatiens and this project?
BP: Nothing but good things. In fact, we just won the grand award for commercial installation (more than $75,000) and project of the year from the Ohio Nursery & Landscape Association at the CENTS show. I think it was that band of SunPatiens that did it.
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