What's on the horizon for gardeners in 2012? Here are 10 plant, design and ideology trends to watch out for this year.
Shades of orange flowers and foliage
Orange has been pronounced the hue of the year by colour industry giant Pantone. This hot colour is echoed in some of the newest perennial cultivars: Baptisia Cherries Jubilee (in the Decadence series); Hemerocallis Primal Scream; Echinacea Flame Thrower; as well as Heuchera Delta Dawn and others.
Breakthroughs in blue
In the past 10 years, the most prominently featured colour in the Perennial Plant Association's Plant of the Year has been blue (Amsonia, Baptisia, Geranium Roxanne, Nepeta Walker's Low), reflecting our love of this hue.
This is great news since blue is a colour complement to orange.
The plant breeders
Florigene and Suntory have broken ground by introducing the new rose cultivar Applause - which is truly more like a dusky purple than a true blue - by inserting the so-called blue gene found in pansies into a Cardinal de Richelieu rose. So far only available to the cut-flower industry (since November), this "blue" rose may make its way soon into plant nurseries.
Stylish exotics are going to be easier to find
Exotics like elephant's ears (Colocasia), a wide colour range of Hibiscus and succulents like Aeoniums are showstoppers when they're used as features in container plantings, but are also vigorous highlights when inserted seasonally into the garden like annuals.
A new company called Hort Couture will be introducing knock-'em-dead varieties of spectacular tropical plants, as well as new annuals, to independent garden retailers through JVK in Canada starting in 2012.
Continued interest in grasses
The recent sad death of Wolfgang Oehme, the German/American landscape designer and enthusiastic ambassador of ornamental grasses (as well as native prairie perennials), will hopefully push nurseries to promote some of the best older varieties, as well as introduce some new ones for their four-season qualities, ease of maintenance, native choice and natural look.
Flowering shrubs take centre stage
They're low maintenance, easily fill larger spaces and provide flowers and fragrance without the upkeep of some fussy perennials.
New long-blooming and carefree varieties of hydrangea, weigela, potentilla, azalea, forsythia, hibiscus, rose, spiraea, viburnum and others will be hitting the shelves beginning in the fall of 2012, courtesy of Proven Winners (provenwinners. com).
Growing your own food
This burgeoning trend among even beginner gardeners includes not only veggies and fruit, but also grapes for wine, chickens for eggs and bees for honey.
Community gardens are on the rise, including those that encourage children, so we don't have to rely on our own small private spaces to grow galloping veggies like pumpkins.
Gardening in shrinking spaces
Many of us are downsizing or choosing to live in urban situations where garden spaces are where we can make them.
How to create a garden on a stoop, balcony or in a pot will be our challenge, as well as creating privacy through plants in order to avoid the feeling of being overlooked.
Low-maintenance gardens
With aging comes weary bones and creaky joints, so perennials and shrubs that require less of our attention are becoming increasingly popular.
Even gardening novices want to have a beautiful outdoor space but not to be a slave to it.
But in order to know what's best and what's a waste of time, a recent Timber Press publication called Decoding Garden Advice: The Science Behind the 100 Most Common Recommendations by Jeff Gillman and Meleah Maynard answers the most important of those questions.
Natural and sustainable gardening
The commitment to encouraging wildlife, gardening sustainably and being chemical-free and waterwise is still, thankfully, gaining ground. A loose and unstructured look achieved through the use of both native and imported plants is in demand among many gardeners.
A great book for those of us living in colder climates was just published: Gardening Naturally: A Chemical Free Handbook for the Prairies by Sara Williams and Hugh Skinner is a great resource, as is Tomorrow's Garden: Design and Inspiration for a New Age of Sustainable Gardening by Stephen Orr.
Reusing, recycling in the garden
We are thinking twice now about buying everything new and throwing it away at the end of every season: we are reusing and re-purposing many of our possessions in the garden.