Published: June 28, 2008 07:27 pm            

Horticulture Day attracts all gardeners

OVERTON — More than 150 nursery growers, professional plant breeders, greenhouse managers and gardening enthusiasts attended the annual Overton horticultural bedding plant trials and field day on June 26.

The field day, which featured more than 500 bedding plant varieties, serves a $500 million North Texas horticultural industry, according to Dr. Brent Pemberton, the Texas AgriLife Research horticulturist who began the trials 14 years ago.

Sponsorship of the field day comes largely from seed companies that wish to see how their new varieties perform under East Texas conditions.

For example, this year, Goldsmith Seeds, an international company based in Gilroy, Calif., entered numerous varieties, including vinca lines resistant to aerial phytophthora, a serious landscape problem with this crop all across the South, Pemberton said.

“We send trials to about a dozen universities around the country,” said Don Snow, Goldsmith Seeds technical product manager. “I actually like this one better; I think it tends to be more realistic. University trials tend to be a little more fluff and often not grown as well as this trial is.”

Texas constitutes a large market for new bedding plant varieties, Snow said.

“This trial is really important to us because when it performs well here, and it performs well in Dallas, then we have the confidence to go to the customers down here and say, ‘this will work for you,’” he said.

“Everyone comes here, because this is one of the most highly regarded bedding plant trials in the United States,” said Wayne Pianta, technical product representative Ball Seed Co., a global seed supply company based in Chicago.

Before Pemberton began his trials, there were few if any tests under East Texas conditions of the many new varieties released by seed companies each year, Pianta said.

Since the first field day with less than 100 varieties, the event has grown to include vinca, ornamental peppers, trailing petunias, verbenas, begonias, portulaca, zinnias, geraniums and ageratum. Pemberton coordinates his trials with similar tests in the Dallas Arboretum. Pemberton noted that the trials would not be possible — at least not in their current size — without volunteer work from the region’s Texas Master Gardeners, organizations of the Texas AgriLife Extension Service. Volunteers provide hundreds of hours of labor planting and tending the plots.

Gary Dobbs, Smith County Master Gardener, said the trials are valuable to him as a gardening enthusiast too.

“I probably put in about 30 hours,” Dobbs said. “Everything looks so much nicer when they’re together where you can compare them one flower to another, versus looking at one here and one somewhere else.”

        

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