Best Sellers of the Season – Redbuds
You know, what’s been the big seller this season so far?
I would say in trees, probably the most excitement I’ve seen come back from customers is in the new redbud varieties. There are so many varieties and so many different leaf colors. They’ve almost turned into the Coral Bells of trees. There’s just so many different foliage colors from yellow to your standard green, your standard purple, but then an orange and red and yellow. A lot of times it will have an orange new growth but a yellow backdrop, so just some really cool changes there.
There’s also been some new varieties of dogwoods that have been released. There’s a new one we’ve got this year called Flaming Moon. It was one of the variegated leaf trees, and that one actually has incredible fall color. It actually turns very, very vibrant red but keeps a little bit of that yellow so it looks like a flame.
They’re really trying to breed trees that not just have good flowers but also have incredible foliage colors because that’s really what you see the vast majority of the year. Plants may bloom for trees especially for 2 weeks, 10 days, 2 weeks, maybe 2 1⁄2 weeks in a good year, but the rest of the year you see the foliage. The breeders are really working hard at trying to create good foliage plant material because the foliage you see every bit as much as the flowers, if not more.
They used to be green or they used to be purple, and there weren’t many options there. The variegated redbud called Alley Cat, it’s a green and white variegated foliage. It’s probably the most popular one this year so far. There’s two of them. One is called Hearts of Fire, and the other one is called Flamethrower. Those two varieties of redbuds have just been extremely popular because there is no other tree anywhere that has that color foliage.
It’s unique. Another really popular one has been Carolina Sweetheart. It’s pink, green, white, and red all marbled in the same foliage. Really beautiful leaves on some of these trees that are out there. The redbud is a native tree, so it’s going to be very used to our climate and our soil and all that.
The original redbud is Ceresus canadensis. That’s the old-fashioned green redbud, and they are native here in Ohio. The redbud has a heart-shaped leaf. It doesn’t matter what color the leaf is, it’s always heart-shaped. That’s why they call them Hearts of Fire.
The Hearts of Fire is a brand new one. It’s a real deep, rich, dark green leaf, then bright red new growth that comes out. The new growth stays on for about two to three weeks in that red color, and then it kind of fades out to green and matches the inside of the tree, and then it flushes red growth again. You get multiple flushes a year, so it’s like having multiple blooms. It’s kind of like a re-blooming plant, but it’s the foliage that’s so attractive.
They are full sun to part shade. They do still need some sunlight. They’re not going to grow as well in a really deep shade environment.
And the other thing, too, through the breeding process, I mean a redbud gets 25 to 30 foot tall. The old-fashioned green leaf, well, some of these new hybrids only get, you know, 12 to 15 foot tall, or there’s one called Rising Sun that I think is 8 to 10 foot tall. So they’ve really dwarfed the trees down in overall size as well, making them fit into areas that they normally wouldn’t fit in.
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