Seth Reed

Sales & Marketing Manager

Pssst ... There's a mystery to solve at the end of this blog, so keep reading. 

AmericanHort’s annual Cultivate tradeshow is an important show for us where we put on display our new products that hit the market the following year. While we do our first introduction at the California Spring Trials, it is often difficult to get some of our products bulked and in bloom. (Exception is 'Red Lark' – See our post on Facebook; it really looked amazing). Our presence at Cultivate is often a little bit more theatrical than at CAST as well. Without further ado, here is our booth.

We had four main messages on display. The first as you might expect was our Veronica Skyward series. We had a sweet set of staircases that spiraled ... skyward ... get it! The blue and pink on display caught a lot of attention. We have been selling the Moody Blues series for quite some time and had that on display so that attendees could see how much larger the Skyward are.

The second message was our shade solutions, which was created using a shade sail anchored by the staircases as posts. In this display we focused on our new Polemonium 'Golden Feathers' and Brunnera 'Frostbite' by placing them in the center of our shade bed. Attendees really liked how they add a whole new level of brightness to the shade bench. Surrounding those plants were our new launches from last year: Lysimachia 'Night Light' and 'Firefly', Heuchera Carnival Burgundy Blast and Cinnamon Stick, and Heuchera Big Top Caramel Apple. People are in love with the color of the Cinnamon Stick.

The third message was a cart display showing our new lineup of Echinacea Sombrero Poco™ series. This series has all the same great uniformity, exceptional branching, heavy flower count, hardiness and first year flowering capability of the Sombrero series but more compact. This display was meant to show how you could fit more on a rack display maximizing the number of plants you could get into the store. And while we didn’t have a display on this, this series is also a great option for combo planters.

The “other” new intros display are not lesser plants, but none of them fit into a larger series or collection. A few standouts from the show are…

Oenthera Evening Sun – This plant has the purest yellow flower I have ever seen and they sit on top of silverly green foliage. The flowers really pop. People kept coming in from the side of the booth specifically to look at that plant.

Sedum What a Doozie – The tri-color look is exceptionally attractive and the pots were full. This plant has shown great stability, which you don’t always find with similar plants.

And then there was our BONUS message – the Delphinium Red Lark display.  Do I really even need to say anything about the plant? No, I don’t think so.

However, two very noteworthy things happened at the show. The first was that we received the “Retailers Choice Award” for exciting new products.

AND ... our plants were STOLEN!!! But for real! We had intended to bring the plants back with us. They were sitting on our display. Chris, Darren and myself all turned around to put a tray of plants on a rack and when we turned back around, the plants were gone. We literally were turned away for no longer than a minute. There was no trace of them anywhere.

Are you dying to grow this plant next year? Contact your favorite sales rep. Do you have a hot tip on what happened to our plants? Write us at info@darwinperennials.com or comment down below.

If you can’t get enough of Darwin Perennials, watch this brief video of some behind-the-scenes as we setup this year's booth. What a great show! Thanks for visiting.