Golden Gate Garden

A number of readers wrote in to ask where they could purchase the Bindens varieties I wrote about in my August column. The one shown above is Bidens Hawaiian Flare series 'Red Drop'. It and other Hawaiian Flare Bidens varieties have been available to wholesalers for at least two years, but are not often to be found in local nurseries. When I saw this variety last summer at the Mendocino Botanical Garden, I asked them about it. They said their supplier was out. I neglected to find out its name, and without a name, I didn't have a way to search for it.

Then the manager of Flowercraft Nursery, in San Franciso, found it in a truck arriving from a wholesaler, thought it might be what I wanted and plucked some out for me. With the correct name, I could write about it, and with the proper name, we can ask local retailers to carry it.

A little research turns up the following information:Bidens Hawaiian Flare series was bred by Florsaika, a Japanese company see florsaika.com/bidens-hawaiian-flare/). It is available only from cuttings, and these are handled exclusively by Florexpo, a company based in Costa Rica that sells unrooted cuttings to brokers worldwide, but mostly to North America, Europe, and Japan. (See florexpo.net)  On the websites of both of these companies, you can see videos that explain their businesses.

From Florexpo, the cuttings go to brokers. Then a wholesale nursery buys them from a broker and grows the  plants up to the size retailers want. Finally, the wholesaler sends out plants, in some combination of what the retailer asks them to send and what they think a retailer will want.

Before I list a plant, I usually contact some local nurseries and make sure they are carrying it, so they won't be caught without it. But in this case, I think the plants are sleepers–great choices that have not become widely available. You might find them available locally, but if not, politely ask your local nursery for the plants by name. Tell them you'd like to have some Bidens Hawaiian Flare Series plants, now, if they can get any, next spring if they can't get them now. Then they will ask their wholesalers about the plants, and either get ones now or see if they can get a wholesaler to grow some for spring. (The nurseries that are most likely to carry these varieties are ones that buy plants from wholesalers, rather than ones that usually grow their own plants from their own seed or cuttings, since these plants have to be grown from purchased cuttings.)

Here is how Hawaiian Flare 'Red Drop' looks in my garden now (growing with blue annual Convolvulus tricolor and some chartreuse green nicotiana).

The plants growing with them are Nicotiana in chartreuse and white and annual Convolvulus tricolor (blue).

Here is another Bidens Hawaiian Flare, 'Red Star', that I found in a nursery, not realizing at the time that it was in the same series as 'Red Drop'.

It is growing here with some blue edging lobelia.

The advantages of the new Bidens varieties are, besides different colors and larger flowers than were otherwise available, that their more open, taller form allows them to drape and to mix with other plants in a border, and their height makes them more attractive to native bees and other beneficial insects.

Finally, here is a close up of the Bidens that used to be the main one available. The plant shown here is fairly young, so only has a few flowers, but when it grows larger, this plant will be a low mat covered with the one inch yellow flowers.

It is growing under a taller feverfew plant that has similar, but larger, leaves.