- As the plant catalog start arriving.

Join us today on Oklahoma Gardening as we recap some of the must have plants for your landscape.

Underwriting assistance for our program is provided by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, food and Forestry, helping to keep Oklahoma Green and growing.

Oklahoma Gardening is also a proud partner with Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust shape your future provides resources for Oklahomans to make the healthy choice the easy choice.

I love sharing with you guys the cool things that plants can do.

We're back here at the Student Farm.

I wanna share with you a tropical plant that you might find in some Oklahoma landscapes.

It's important to know which plants we are dealing with so that we can continue to maintain them successfully for years to come.

Petunias have come a long way from your grandmother's garden.

It's no wonder that they're one of the most popular annuals to utilize in the landscape.

And they used to just come in like solid purples, pinks, whites and yellows.

But since then they have continued to create all sorts of different versions, in fact.

So from here over, we're looking at petunias.

You can see that we've now got doubles.

We've got really dark ones.

This one here is kind of bordered with this lime green, yellow around the edges and it's just really attractive.

We've also got a lot that are now striped as well.

So petunias, one of the nice things about petunias is obviously when they're out in the landscape, they give you that nice little fragrance, kind of a sweet smell as you're walking around them.

But typically some of them are either mounding but then we also have these wave petunias that they came out with that really spread out a lot more.

So these are great in the landscape in a garden bed so that you can really feel an area with that annual color.

So this particular one is just a wave petunia that is a white one here and it's going to get about 30 inches in diameter and stay relatively short.

Whereas some of these others will get more of a mounding habit to 'em.

Now another popular line that's come out is the super and those have been out for quite a while and they're coming out with more and more colors.

This particular one is called persimmon here and you can see how it has a nice kind of greenish yellow throat to it and then sort of an apricot rim around the corolla there.

The nice thing about the a supertunia series though is that they are self-cleaning, meaning you don't have to deadhead them.

So some of the older petunias you might remember that you would have to go around and remove those spent flowers to prevent them from producing seed.

So a lot of times you would see the color, it would come on and then it would sort of fade for a while and if you didn't deadhead it, it would go into seed production and then you would find little seedlings later on in your garden.

So that's one thing that you don't have to worry about with the supertunia series and some other petunias that have been more recently developed.

Now the other thing too is while a lot of petunias have bigger flowers on them, they are also getting smaller.

So you might find some of these that are a little bit smaller here.

So this one is very similar to this older one, this royal velvet here, this is a supertunia mini vista and you can see the flowers are about half the size of this one here.

So they are getting just a little bit smaller, almost starting to look like caliber COAs and we're gonna get to those here in a minute.

Again, here is another one.

This is called a little tuna.

So again, a very striped one, kind of a bicolor there, another bicolor here.

And then also this is another mini supertunia.

And so again, you can see this is a regular super tuna.

Here's a mini super.

And then next to it here we have Calibrachoa.

And these are a different plant than petunias.

And so you can see, although they look very similar and in fact our have a common name called million bells because of that bell shaped flower like a petunia.

And again, they just put profuse number of flowers all over them.

But this is a fairly recent introduction.

They were kind of introduced into the horticulture market in the 1990s and have only grown in popularity since they have a much smaller flower than petunias about a half inch in diameter.

So you can see though the difference is while petunias originally had more of a solid color, of course you know some of the hybrids have really changed since then.

The caliper growers really do have a mix and a range of color in each of their flowers and even on their plants in some cases.

So here we've got several and what's nice about 'em is they're just very dainty little flowers.

Another benefit to having chalibrichoas is that they are all self-cleaning, so you don't have to worry about deadheading them when they're out in your garden.

Now as far as planting petunias are chalibrichoas.

So petunias do really well as a bedding plant.

They do like high organic material.

So if you have heavy clay, you maybe wanna make sure to amend that soil first with some organic matter or perhaps just stick them in containers.

They do really well in containers too.

So if you are wanting to fill a landscape bed and really cover that space, you might look at something that is like a spreading petunia versus more of the mounding petunias that are available on the market chalibrachoas.

However, I would suggest maybe keeping those in a container just because they can be a little more sensitive to some of our soil conditions.

They do really like a lot of good drainage and high organic matter again, but they can be a little more sensitive to that.

So they work really well for containers.

In fact, you'll often see that you can buy hanging baskets full of these chalabrichoas and they just make a beautiful display.

The other thing to keep in mind with these is also the color.

So if I'm looking for something to plant out in the landscape, you can see that these petunias come in both bright colors and also some really dark colors.

And while this dark color might look nice on a bench, 'cause a lot of times we're buying these, we're looking at 'em on a landscape bench, they might look nice, this dark color or even some of the darker ones might not look, look that good out in a large bed because they're just gonna look like shadows and voids in the landscape.

And so it, it'll just kind of look like green and dark.

You won't necessarily see that.

So if you do really wanna use some of these dark colors, go ahead and make sure to mix in some of these yellows or whites to kind of brighten it up and highlight some of those darker colors in the landscape.

Or perhaps use these in containers or beds that are really up close to your house where you're gonna notice them a little more intimately than somewhere farther away.

Stick with the bolder, brighter colors for something that's a large mass planting out in the, in the landscape.

Chalibrichoas like I said, they work really well in containers because all of these need good drainage, but especially the chalibrichoas.

But because they have such a mix of colors, these work really nicely in those container mixes.

And the other thing is you can kind of look at the different colors and pull out other combinations of flowers.

So here you can see we have a yellow, we have some peach, we have some orange.

And so you could go ahead and mix several of these different chalibrichoas together and giving you a nice combination in a container.

And they also do even come in these doubles like you can see right here.

So that is what you'll probably see out in the nurseries right now, our petunias, chalibrichoas and a lot of other annuals.

So when you're headed out to the nursery, make sure you know what you're shopping for.

Today I wanted to talk about a plant that a lot of us probably already know about.

However, I know that there's always new people coming into the world of gardening.

And this is a plant that if you know about it, it might remind you of your grandmother's garden.

And if you don't know about it, it's one that a lot of times this plant goes unnoticed.

But for those two weeks and it's blooming and creating this massive color, it will stop you as you're driving through a neighborhood.

So if you don't know what this is, this is called creeping phlox or phlox sublata.

Now you can see it just makes this massive blanket of flower, which is what it's known for.

It only gets to be about six inches tall and each plant will have a spread of about three feet.

Now it's pretty popular.

It's, it's relatively common in a lot of gardens because a lot of times if you're in the gardening world, they'll other gardeners will share it with you.

It's easy to divide.

So just with some division you can dig some of it up and share it.

But you can see here what happens is it actually kind of grows over different areas.

So having a height of only about six inches, it makes a really nice low growing plant.

What you might not know about this plant, however, is it is actually a native all the way up into Ontario.

So being hardy from zones three to nine, you will find this naturally growing in kind of rocky, well drained areas, ledges and things like that.

And so we try to replicate that a lot of times in the garden being a native, it does however, have relatively few pest and disease problems.

You might see that it will get some red spider mites on it in the hot dry summertime.

But other than that, it doesn't have too many problems.

The rabbits might like nippling on the foliage a little bit, but it's actually considered unpalatable for the deer.

So you don't really have any problem with the deer eating on this.

Now you'll notice that the foliage for most of the year, what you'll see is just kind of this green, massive foliage.

Some people also called it moss phlox.

Because of that foliage has kind of a needle like, or all shaped leaf.

It can be a little pricky prickly when it gets more mature.

But as it's new vegetation coming out, it's pretty soft.

So it's, it's not too bad, nothing that you have to be worried about or anything.

It comes in a range of colors, however.

So you can see here we have this kind of light purple color.

You can also get really a dark pink or even a light pink goes into whites and even into blue shades as well.

Regardless of which color you end up choosing, you're going to have a beautiful plant, relatively low maintenance that gives you a nice display each spring.

And also with this massive star shaped tubular flowers, it's also gonna be appealing to the butterflies and hummingbirds as well.

- Our Oklahoma proven shrub for 2024 is this shrub right here.

This is a great plant.

It is actually been around for decades, but is kind of an underutilized species in my opinion.

And this is the contorted filbert or sometimes called Harry Lauder's walking stick corylus avellana contorta.

This is a really cool shrub because of its curly twisty stems as well as the leaves.

So you can see even the leaves kind of look a little bit curly and twisted, kind of droop a little bit.

So some people might, you know, initially look at it and think it's, you know, got a problem.

But this is actually its natural habit.

But the, the prize, you know, feature of this is those curly twisty stems which are really more noticeable.

Of course during the winter time, after all the leaves fall.

Now this plant can get up to eight, 10 foot tall.

It is pretty tough once you get it established, it tolerates a wide variety of soil conditions.

It's cold, hearty throughout Oklahoma.

You just really need well drained soils.

Now this form of it, the curly twisty stem form of it, the contorted form is often grafted onto a non contorted root stock.

So if you have suckers that pop up you'll want that are not curly and twisty, then you'll want to remove those.

However, some growers actually grow them on their own root stock.

So you may get curly twisty suckers as well.

In the winter, not only are the stems nice to look at, but in the late winter, the the, the male flowers, which are catkins will be kind of a yellow gray color and they will be hanging from the plant and they will look really nice too occasionally.

And I've never really seen nuts on our on these plants before, but actually ours is producing a few hazelnuts even though this is not grown for them and typically don't grow very many.

So if you're looking for a cool, a fun, unique shrub for your garden space, this might be something to consider.

- If you're looking at adding a little tropical flare, your backyard landscape, we've got just the plant for you.

This is a relatively new introduction of taros or elephant ears.

This is called ccia, Royal Hawaiian Waikiki.

And you can see that it's just a beautiful display of foliage here.

And it may come as no surprise that it's also an all America selection for the ornamentals.

It was a winner in ornamental category in 2023 and it's got that traditional elephant ear look with this deep green foliage to it.

But what really makes it nice and stand out and striking is the fact that it's got this kind of creamy white blotch that's overlaid with also this purple pink veining right down the center of it.

So each leaf is kind of different, giving you a little bit of unique, almost artistic display every time another leaf unfolds.

Now it gets to be about three feet tall and will also kind of form a clump that's about three foot wide.

And each leaf is about 18 inches long and they come up on these beautiful deep purple stems.

So again, a nice contrast with this foliage.

Now you'll know elephant ears are really known for this foliage and of course they kind of just flutter in the wind.

This particular one has been kind of noted as having really good resistance to wind damage.

And we can say that we have noticed that here in Oklahoma.

Also, with it being holding up to all of our rains that we had this spring, you can see here we have it in an ornamental bed.

So it likes kind of moist moderate water but needs well drained soil.

So for that fact, it also does well in a container.

So you can use it as a thriller.

But the nice thing about one of these is the fact that you can put a couple in a container container it actually works just well by itself.

So if you're kind of not sure on what to do with the design, just add a few of these into the container.

And because of this form you're gonna have the height, but you're also gonna have some of these to sort of fill the container as well.

Like I said, it is an annual, so you're gonna use it as a tropical, you're only gonna get it for the full season.

But the nice thing, because we're after the foliage, you don't have to worry about deadheading or any of that stuff.

You're gonna have this color all season long.

It is a tropical that's hardy from zones seven B up to 11.

But if you wanted to over winter, what you could do is dig it up and actually put it in a pot and then bring it in almost like a house pant to over winter it through those winter months and then plant it back out in the spring again once the concern of frost freeze is over with.

But this is a nice plant to add some tropical flare into your backyard.

Again, it's called Royal Hawaiian Waikiki.

If you're looking for a good structure plant to add into your landscape, you might consider Burkewood viburnum.

Now this particular selection is actually called Kanoi.

So the traditional viburnum X Burke woody eye is going to get much larger.

It's gonna get eight to 10 feet tall and about five to seven foot wide foot wide.

But whereas this is kanoi, it's actually gonna stay much shorter, so it's only gonna get four to five feet tall.

However, it still will grow pretty wide up to about seven feet, eight feet in width.

Now it is a slow grower, so you don't have to worry about that taking off right away.

But you can see here they've used it on the north side of a building on OSU campus and it makes a nice foundation planning.

So if you're looking for something to add into your landscape to kind of help buffer some hardscape or something like that, or it works well just as a single specimen plant and allowing it to kind of grow and have that natural form, you can see that early in the spring and April it's gonna be covered with these white humble flowers that actually start out when there's buds.

They kind of have kind of a pink tension to 'em, but they will definitely open up white.

And you can see there's a lot of pollinators on here.

So it's a nice pollinator plant early on in the spring as well.

So because it blooms so early, you wanna make sure if you are trimming it not to trim it until after it blooms.

'cause otherwise you will be cutting off those flowers.

Now if you don't trim it at all and these get pollinated, then you will see some kind of red droop that develop later on in the season that will slowly turn to black.

They're not necessarily showy.

So if you do trim it, you're not missing out on too much.

But if you are looking for that, then having a mass of these plants is gonna help pollinate those even better.

The Kanoi Burwood Viburnum is an introduction that came from the US National Arboretum actually, and it is hardy from zones five to eight.

And you'll notice in the cooler climates that the foliage will actually start to turn kind of a maroon color later on in the fall.

However, in zone seven to eight, you'll see that it's a semi evergreen, so it's actually gonna retain some of that foliage.

The soil conditions that it really prefers are anywhere from sandy to clay soil.

So that kind of covers the gamut here in Oklahoma.

So it does really well.

And once it is established, it is a drought tolerant.

Now, being on the north side of this building, it's going to get some sun, so it does like full sun, but can handle part shade as well.

So that's a nice addition.

So it's pretty amenable to any location, but it's a great easy low maintenance plants and really there are no pest problems either.

So again, a nice addition.

It's kind of known for having these glossy leaves that are also sort of pubescent, meaning you can see that there's kind of this grayish look to 'em, and that's basically little hairs that under are on the leaves and also on the stems.

So this again is Kanoi Birkwood Viburnum, a nice addition to your landscape.

- Our Oklahoma proven annual for this year is a wonderful zinnia, and this is one of my favorites.

So this is Zinnia red yellow bicolor.

It's a hybrid between zinnia and Gusta folia and zinnia elegance.

And it's in the profusion series.

So it's a really tough variety.

It has beautiful flowers on it all year long.

They start out with this nice, beautiful, bright red center with the yellow outer portions of the petals.

And then as the, as the flowers mature, as we go through the season, they start turning a a, an apricot color, then a salmon color, and finally a dusty rose color.

So eventually you'll end up with all three colors on the same plant as the plant continues to produce new flowers that are bright red and yellow.

So this plant gets about 10 to 8, 8 10 to 14 inches high and wide.

And you can see it's very nice and compact, very uniform.

It's very quite drought tolerant once it gets established.

Great for pollinators.

We've got lots of bees visiting in them this morning.

So this is also an All America selection winner received the gold medal here as well as in trials in Europe.

So this is a awesome little annual, very nice, neat and compact, has beautiful foliage and colors of flowers throughout the growing season.

- I just had to show you guys this garden that we built a couple of years ago.

And if you remember, we put this concrete a block to help kind of build up the soil around our greenhouse and it had a lot of aggregate in it.

And so we wanted to put something that was drought tolerant.

And what we ended up doing was taking some cuttings from a province lavender that we had in another bed, and we took several cuttings and then planted it a year ago last spring.

So they had one year to grow out.

This is the second year to grow on these lavenders and look how great they look.

They just look absolutely stunning and are doing that job of not only softening the edge of our greenhouse, but of course inviting in a lot of pollinators as well.

Now, something about this that we sort of did too to kind of help transition it through that season was earlier in the season we actually had some different alliums planted in here, Sputnik, and then also universe, some of the larger ornamental allium bulbs.

And then you can see we still have some residual chives that were blooming earlier.

And then we also had chamomile.

So having those ornamental alliums planted and then also the chives and the chamomile made quite a display early on in the season before the lavender really took off.

Now we also have another allium still planted that you can see down in there that is the millennium allium, and it's still just now starting to come on.

So it's got buds on there, and so it will pick up that display a little bit later.

But what I like about it is all of that foliage got tucked away and kind of hidden in with this lavender.

So you know, one of those things about like what do you do with that foliage after the flowers blooming?

How do you disguise it?

And I think we did a fantastic job with this.

So I just wanted to share with you how this is looking after two years of being planted.

It's doing a great job, not only highlighting our greenhouse here, but also the pollinators and bees love it as well.

There are a lot of great horticulture activities this time of year.

Be sure and consider some of these events in the weeks ahead.

Join us next week on Oklahoma Gardening as we show you how to get your winter seats started.

So when we're talking about Caliber COAs, this is a voiceover for Caliber COAs.

See and satisfy those birds and hummingbird, hummingbirds and butterflies to find out more information about show topics as well as recipes, videos, articles, fact sheets, and other resources, including a directory of local extension offices.

Be sure to visit our website at Oklahoma gardening dot OK state.edu.

Join in on Facebook and Instagram.

You can find this entire show and other recent shows as well, individual segments on our Oklahoma Gardening YouTube channel.

Tune in to our okay gardening classics YouTube channel to watch segments from previous hosts.

Oklahoma Gardening is produced by the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service as part of the division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University.

The Botanic Garden at OSU is home to our studio gardens and we encourage you to come visit this beautiful Stillwater Gem.

We would like to thank our generous underwriters, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, food and Forestry, and Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust.

Additional support is also provided by Greenleaf Nursery and the Garden Debut Plants, the Oklahoma Horticulture Society, the Tulsa Garden Club, and the Tulsa Garden Center.