Why we need new ornamental plants

• Better pest and disease resistance - This objective may produce little or no cost in spraying pesticides and a great reduction in environmental pollution. For example, many plants are now being breed for mildew resistance so fungicides do not need to be applied or at least in much reduced amounts. There are now over 10 modern elm hybrids with the same beauty (and even more) of the legendary American elm that was wiped out by Dutch Elm Disease. Such general categories as fireblight, leaf spot, powdery mildew, anthracnose, leaf miner, and canker have been nearly eliminated as problems in many genera - but only if you research and invest in the new cultivars with genetic resistance. Plant breeders have been very creative on this front - even making plants taste bitter to their normal insect foes or adding hairs which discourage creatures from chomping or landing. Locating and perhaps even spending a bit more on such resistant plants can result in many categories of savings within a few years.
• New colors and shades - breeders are bringing new flower colors to many plant groups such as near blue roses, pure white daylilies, orange Magnolia, and white marigolds. Even when the colors are not completely new they are often improved to be cleaner (less blue or magenta tints), brighter, paler (more useful pastels), longer laster (less fading), and more sun tolerant. Many flowering plants now have brightly colored red, purple, yellow, or variegated foliage so they remain showy before and after they bloom. New plants expand the palette you have to design your garden for best effect.
• Multi-season interest - some flowering plants are 'one week wonders' in that they bloom 4-7 days and the rest of the year have minimal ornamental beauty. Plant breeding and selection lets us add glorious fall colors, showy winter fruit, breathtaking exfoliating bark, bright cheerful foliar variegation, and attractive stem colors to otherwise dull plants. Especially in small gardens and urban plantings we need plants to be interesting more than just a few days a year. At last count we knew of over 15 plant breeding programs working specifically on the breeding and selection of trees and shrubs for reliable, brighter, earlier, and longer fall colors. This assures that your red maples will light up red and your burning bushes really burn.
• New combinations - sometimes you have a plant with nice showy foliage and another with a superior growth form. Breeding and seedling selection can often allow us to combine the best from two or more plants. For example we have beech trees with weeping habit AND purple leaves. For decades all the weepers were green and all those with purple foliage were upright. In case of crapemyrtles they combined the lovely exfoliating bark of one white-flowered species with the rich rose and red flowers of another. The modern garden rose is a perfect example where popular hybrids combine the fragrance, flower size, abundant reblooming, and clustered flowers of several species. Genetic engineering will be allowing us to combine traits among diverse genera and even entire plant families. We haven't seen anything yet!
• Uniform characteristics - many species are grown from seed or from a few variable strains. You hardly know what you will get in terms of foliage, cold hardiness, flower color, or even plant size. It is sometimes impossible to have a neat, uniform landscape when plants can vary widely in their appearance. To avoid a hodge-podge (and even the feared hedge-podge), unkempt look we are now able to offer plants which perform exactly as expected in terms of both appearance and cultural requirements - just like the clones they are.
• Remove bad triats - besides susceptability to diseases and pests some plants have other wild traits we do not always want in gardens. Many trees (and roses too) are now bred to be thornless so they are less hazardous to people - children and the visually impaired in particular. We also have triploid and male cultivars which produce little or no messy fruit and are incapable of sowing unwanted seedlings around the landscape. Some lovely flowering plants spread vigorously like their weedy relatives and these 'invasive' tendencies can be reduced by applying genetics in place of herbicide or hard labor. One of the most interesting new ideas for a plant were lilies developed to be free of all messy orange pollen. This made them ideal for corsages without time-consuming clipping or putting up with stained designer clothes.
• Equalizing Features - some plants are traditionally known only for great flowers and others exclusively for dazzling foliage. With a bit of time and effort many plant groups have flowers, foliage, and form of near equal beauty. Most roses once had dull, pale, disease-ridden foliage. Now they come in dark, glossy, durable, and even red-tinted elegance. Once variegated Hosta had flowers as a small fringe benefit. Now the colors are better, they're more abundant, last longer, take on artistic forms, and have heavenly scents. In short, this work is making plant genera and hybrid groups more complete, balanced, and versatile as design objects. While we do not want all plants to have shiny, black-green, thicker foliage we can make more strides in bringing out the desirable, unique genetics of each genus.
• Intermediates - One of the most popular of all landscape plants is the Pfitzer juniper and its numerous colorful selections. It is the product of crossing a tall cedar-like species with a low spreading species to create a whole new growth form - arching-spreading. The two parent species were not as suitable for modern plantings as this graceful spray- like, mounding form which is ideal for foundations or a wide groundcover. Crosses between the common flowering dogwood and the Japanese dogwood produce plants blooming between the two species. Breeding an early-flowering species to later-blooming one is a popular technique used in many genera. In many plant groups people have hyridized yellow-flowering species with red and pink ones to create a veritable sunset of shades not known in nature.
• Consumer advantage - some superior plants are trademarked and patented by teams of corporate executives, attorneys, and marketing rights experts. While legal protection of plants is often highly desirable it may add costs at the garden center end of things and even restrict the number of people able to find a plant type. Some of the growers only sell wholesale and you may not have an retail outlet in your area - and some plants are not available by mailorder by legal restrictions. In other cases the plant's developer charges higher prices for a 'creation' than others would prefer - to put it somewhat tactfully. Fortunately nature often gives us parallel mutations or simple luck in getting a random combination of traits similar to another. Just like the world of prescription drugs and grocery store food we now have 'generic brand cultivars' which might cost less, have wider distribution, and hopefully are just as good. They may not always be superior and there is considerably controversy (and even fraud) in this reason for creating new named clones. You may find a $12 'new' Hosta as fine as a scarce one once sold for $150; or at least good enough for your needs. Designer plants with designer prices don't fit all budgets. Likewise you may be free to propagate one plant in your nursery but not the higher priced, patented one.
• Adapt to changing human spaces - a hundred years ago we did not need dense, shorter trees to thrive and give shade under power lines. We all pay the cost of utility companies wasting time trimming millions of old trees and for repair of heaved sidewalks. Trees designed for so-called streetscape (curbside) planting reduce many of these costs. Home properities (even in the suburbs) are smaller now and we require less massive perennials, compact shrubs, and narrower trees. Just measure sometime the height of front windows in a old house versus a modern ranch or condo. The cost of yard maintenance (to say nothing of improved relations with next door) is one benefit of 'space appropriate' new plants. Many of the older cultivars of woody plants were developed to fill vast estate grounds, public parks, and botanical gardens. Today we need practical plants sized to urban office buildings and smaller residential parcels. In many plant groups there is a rush to find semi-dwarf or intermediate sized plants with the advantages of their tall cousins but not the slowness and vulnerability of full dwarf or midget mutations. Breeding intermediates for size is often useful.
• Product Life - for years we have developed roses and other floral crops which last longer and hold up better during shipping. Since your next dozen roses may have more frequent flyer miles than you do this can be very important for both economic and aesthetic reasons. Product life and durability selection cuts losses, reduces retail prices, prevents customer disappointment, and makes our homes and offices more beautiful for more days. Not long ago a plant breeding program for house plants selected plants with stronger leaf stems and blades so they would not tear or snap in shipment from Florida to the rest of North America. All the new colors and disease resistance in the world does no good if the plants can't survive loading docks, planes, trucks, garden centers, post office storage, shipping company haste, and worst of all - grocery store plant displays. I guess you might even call this breeding for human resistance. Until the Internet develops a PTP (Plant Transfer Protocol) to download plants we're going to need plants than can survive hundreds of miles of travel and quick handling.
• Space utilization - So-called 'ornamental edible plants' give us tasty fruit or foliage while providing more beauty than normal vegetables or fruiting plants. We now have compact blueberries which stay neat in small yards and provide a bright rainbow of autumn foliage colors like a burning bush might have done. There are improved varieties of herbs, peppers, tomatoes, climbing beans, and lettuce with beauty of both form and flavor. Perhaps one of the best uses of space are the new crabapples which provide spring flowers, colorful red summer foliage, fruit for jelly, and lingering fruit to feed wildlife. Some are narrow and columnar and take up a third the lateral space of old kinds. The USDA has an entire line of plants which feed and shelter wildlife, protect farms from wind, control soil erosion, reclaim poor soils, demand little care, and may have very showy leaves, fruit, twigs, and and flowers. Wow! To borrow an adjective from the DOD we might call these 'multi-role plants'. They do more with less effort in equal or smaller spaces.
• Cost-effective propagation - some plants only germinate or root a small percentage of the seeds or cuttings a grower will try. Others require time-consuming grafting, budding, staking, and sucker removal. Some of the prettiest plants God has seen fit to sprout or sport in our gardens multiply very slowly even under the best nursery care. All this adds costs to your garden center and mailorder plants. Plants like any commodity are not immune to the laws of supply and demand regardless of how we appreciate them as objects of art and miracles of science. Plants are now being bred that root in much higher percentages and sometimes no longer require the elaborate grafting used for centuries in the nursery profession. Some respond best to tissue culture and give superior results with this highly economical technology. Tissue culture is the horticultural world's version of the Xerox machine. We now get millions of new plants in the same time we'd only get a 100 rooted cuttings or 10 divisions in old times. Genetics has helped the USDA create very inexpensive strains of many trees, shrubs, groundcovers, and grasses which are remarkably uniform when grown by seed. Because of plant breeding AND university research we now have better plants at lower prices in fewer years. More people can afford and find the finest plants available.
• Environmental resistance - many parts of the world are getting noisier, drier, wetter, more polluted, windier, and heavily trafficed. In some cities it is very difficult to grow trees like in decades past. Plants are now being bred for urban resistance in such tough spots. Many have thicker, durable foliage, roots tolerating more soil compaction, less injury prone bark, and ability to thrive in poor, drier soils. While we do not yet have trees that are bullet resistant or have a 10 MPH crash rating there is hard laboratory and field data to support how durable many new cultivars can be over old ones. Several breeders have developed improved plants to help reclaim eroded riverbanks, strip mine sites, and flooded plains in record time. The natural ecological process can be speeded up by decades in some cases. Even the old enemies of ice, snow, and wind (especially in bad combinations) are less trouble for new cultivars with stronger, better angle branches that resist splitting and have less shallow roots. That saves tax money, arborist fees, insurance dollars, valuable real estate, and even lives. Planting trees with superior architecture by genetics is even a serious matter of liability and law in some cities. Mandating 'weather tough' plants by cultivar and species name is taken very seriously when billions of dollars in infrastructure can be at stake. Think of it as product safety issue if that helps.
• Alleviate boredom - Fun - quite frankly the world would be a dull place if we couldn't try new things. Plant collectors and curators es- pecially love to find new, useful things just as would any enthusiast of coins, stamps, antiques, or art. Variety is the spice of life and diversity is essential for knowledge or something like that. If curiosity is one of our species' greatest strengths and weaknesses, the desire to collect more things and new things is perhaps it's finest manifestation. Plant collecting can be addicting as [name your favorite poison]. One popular plant collector's catalog printed a mock Surgeon General's warning to humorously alert consumers. Also, we must not discount the role of new plants as pure entertainment at home and in public gardens. So many gardens now function as social clubs and research centers at the same time and new plants are often the subject of interesting discussions. Those of us who grew up in horticulturally aware homes (your author had 400 kinds of plants by junior high) can also testify that finding, ordering, studying, and observing new plants provides a great education in science, economics, practical mechanics, design, and Latin. Kids (and adults) can have much worse hobbies.
• Quicker beauty - some plants would not bloom much from small nursery plants until 5, 10, 20, or more years. One either has to spend big bucks to bring in large, mature plants or simply wait. Planting something on the family farm for your grandchildren doesn't usually work anymore. Today we have trees, shrubs, and vines selected to bloom as very young plants for our young, impatient, mobile generations. We also have perennials which bloom the first year from seed - instead of one waiting 2 or perhaps 3 years. We even have conifers selected for their abundance of showy cones or juniper 'berries' when rooted as small plants. Before these selections one only had such beauty with towering specimens 40-70 years old.
• Experiencing world diversity - Exciting plants from Asia, Africa, Russia, and even remote N. American regions are being grown and promoted for the first time in history. Plants from threatened tropical rainforests are being introduced at a rapid rate for use as house plants, zoological park exhibits, and ornamentals in Florida. We sometimes find a Korean plant does better in parts of the US than our native one. English gardens are full of great American plants few American gardeners have even heard about. Cities in the cold north now grow summer bedding plants of tropical species for urban planters and ground coverage - just because sometime tried it and it worked beautifully - far nicer than endless cascades of Petunias. We can always utilize more diversity in plants when educating our children in the basics of ecology, botany, horticulture, and art.
• Image, prestige, honor - while perhaps the least noble of reasons we get or need new plants, this is a major force in the world of ornamental plant development. Mega-Nursery A has a dwarf, red-flowered hybrid that's patented and now Ultra-Nursery B needs something to compete with it; as marketing people would say 'fill the product line niche'. Even reputable botanical gardens, universities, and arboreta are releasing plants which honor their name, local team, regional hero, culture, town, and (God help us) the occasional politician. Frankly we do not always have a need for these plants (evenly locally) as many are similar to existing introductions. Some plant breeders use their own names or a noun as a series. They want to have every imaginable color, form, and shape in their series - even though forty others have or will do the same already. Clearly a cultivar named for a popular sports team or something interesting about the area is likely to sell better than a plant with some long Japanese or difficult German name. Of course pairing your family name or pretigious group with a new, briefly tested plant can backfire and there are some famous examples of disasters with the biggest names in the seed and nursery business. In other related cases it justifies research projects to produce more plants than might be otherwise released if one did not have live or die by grants and association donations. Fortunately most of the top ornamentals breeders of the past few decades have used considerable good taste and restraint. We hope it continues. If creating new plants for commercial and career reasons bothers you it may help to think of new plants as a mode of self expression. We would not fault a painter, sculpter, or architect for building on an existing style and adding their own touch. Some folks view breeding, selecting, and exploring for new plants as a form of genetic art - a legacy that improves the lives of other humans while forging a clear self or organizational identity. In short, we sometimes need new plants for our careers, reputations, and legacies.
• Scientific research - some plants are not developed to be used by the gardening public but to serve as research tools and resources. Many state and federal programs create lines or strains of plants for use by other plant breeders to help them add a particular gene or set of good genes into plants they breed for their local conditions. There are now plants which are adaptable for genetic engineering work but of themselves are not suitable for retail. For centuries plant breeders have found some plants make good parents (pollen or ovary donors if you will) but of themselves they are not much to look at. We also have 'indicator plants' which are highly suspectable to some pest, disease or stress and can be used in field trials as standards to compare with new hybrids under evaluation. There are also plants being developed every year which have unusual traits that help researchers learn more about the mechanisms of physiology and anatomical development - just as a cancer researcher may use genetically altered white rats.
• Preservation - with many habitats endangered or out of reach for political reasons large botanical collections and governmental germplasm banks are valuable sources of genetic conservation. Just like zoos gather new species, breed them, and return them to the wild, curators of new, rare plants are taking on a similar function. (Fortunately orchids are easier to mate than pandas and rhinos). Since the genetic diversity of some plants is as great in collections as in the wild it is quite useful to re-introduce some species into preserves, parks, and naturalized gardens. Now that construction, pollution, and deforestration may prevent plants from natural interbreeding in the wild, it is occasionally useful to stir the genetic soup in our gardens, parks, and greenhouses. Man is part of nature (not an evil bystander) and when we breed and select plants to benefit ourselves, habitats, AND wildlife we do more good than harm. Birds, insects, and animals create new, fascinating plants and with careful knowledge and study we can too. While history is full of introduced, new plants which have overrun fragile ecosystems, there are thousands of stories where superior genetic populations have dramatically restored wetlands, denuded forests, public parks, and prairies. Devoted study of plants and creation of new ones has and will continue to help us be wise stewards of the Plant Kingdom.