A Look Back at the Best of the Best from Mast Young Plants Summer Trials
Each summer, Mast Young Plants in Grand Rapids, MI, invites customers, sales representatives, and breeders to experience our program offerings live at our trial gardens. These trial gardens serve as our living catalog and include all of the varieties offered in our liner program from more than 25 breeders, giving visitors opportunity to see and evaluate actual garden performance of varieties they’re considering for their own retail offerings the following spring. Additionally, our trial gardens ensure that we’re offerings our customers quality items with proven garden performance. In fact, we often begin selections for the following year’s catalog based on the results of our summer trial gardens. With so many choices with plant genetics, our trial gardens help us meet our commitment to providing top-quality varieties with proven performance for our customers.
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When Michigan’s shelter-in-place order was first announced in March 2020, we were still anticipating a normal summer. We were grateful that by early summer, public health guidelines in Michigan allowed for outdoor gatherings that could adhere to physical distancing guidelines. With our outdoor trials spread out over several acres, we were confident that we could host guests safely onsite and we proceeded with plans to open our gardens to the public. We also realized that various state travel restrictions, travel reductions across the industry, and ongoing public health concerns could definitely affect visitor traffic to the gardens. However, since one of our stated purposes for trialing is our own evaluation of the varieties we offer, we decided that even with the prospect of reduced public attendance, we would still plant and evaluate the trial.
The trial garden experience was different this year. We took numerous precautions to ensure our guests could safely enjoy our trial gardens: single-use pens, personal hand sanitizers, increased sanitization of public spaces, individual catalogs, and pre-packaged snacks and beverages. We usually welcome numerous bus tours, provide daily lunch for guests during the two-week Michigan Garden Plant Tour, and host multiple large events for broker groups. None of those happened this year. Our biggest disappointment was cancelling our customer appreciation day.
Despite these changes, we were thrilled to hold the trial and to welcome the 500 visitors who traveled to view it. With the cancellation of nearly all events where we typically connect with industry colleagues, we were extremely grateful for the opportunity to spend time with broker representatives and customers we’d missed seeing these last number of months.
We gained some valuable insights from the trial gardens, pandemic edition:
- This confirmed that we can adapt and succeed in the face of uncertainty as an organization and an industry
- The Mast Young Plants team’s commitment to our customers is top-notch. Their flexibility, creativity, and adaptability were instrumental in providing an exceptional trial experience for guests during a pandemic.
- We learned to expand the trial experience to a virtual audience. We’ve heard how valuable the trial experience is to so many visitors over the years, so we took steps this year to share the trial gardens with those unable to attend in person using digital resources. We filmed trial garden updates, blogged about our trial garden process and results, and shared these resources and numerous photo and video updates on social media. These were so well received that we plan to continue this practice in future years.
- People love plants, and people love to connect over plants. While there were fewer opportunities for large gatherings at our trials this year, we appreciated opportunities for meaningful personal connections and conversations that individual and small group visits offered.
We invite trial garden visitors to vote for their favorites. Their top five were:
- Petunia ‘Bee’s Knees’ (Ball Flora Plant): The deep yellow color (good color saturation) made it stand out even from a distance. It featured a great mounded habit and it held up beautifully throughout the entire summer. It was a top pick from July through the very end of the summer.
- Petunia ‘Splash Dance Magenta Mambo’ (Danziger): Selecta is letting other breeders breed and sell the “sky” type petunias and Danziger is now in the market with the Splash Dance series. Early to flower and featuring a controlled and mounded habit, Splash Dance also looks differently throughout the summer in different temperatures. With a mix of white and yellow speckles in the flowers, these can look different when it is hot or cool.
- Rudbeckia ‘Rising Sun Chestnut Gold’ (Green Fuse Botanicals): A daylength neutral rudbeckia hirta that bloomed throughout the entire summer. Its bicolor flower is especially attractive and it performed excellently in some of our window boxes.
- Petunia ‘Itsy Magenta’ (Syngenta Flowers): This variety was awarded the position of honor atop our pergola and wowed visitors all summer. It is truly a small flowered petunia with a lot of power. A great landscape petunia variety, it also mixed beautifully in combinations. It could be an option to replace blue or purple calibrachoa in summer combos, given its similar habit and flower size and superior summer performance. It doesn’t have pH issues and is not attractive to thrips.
- Begonia ‘Big White Green Leaf’ (Benary): People have been waiting for the Big series to have a white and now we have it. This variety did excellent in our trials. It grew as wide as it did tall and truly lives up to its “Big” name. The foliage stayed green and did not bronze even in full sun. It was truly spectacular and only kept improving as the season progressed.
Garden trials such as ours are likely to grow in importance as they benefit customers, growers, and the industry as a whole. Trials provide the best opportunity to truly evaluate plant performance in garden conditions that closely mimic those of end consumers. As we continue marketing and selling plants to emerging generations, we need to sell them plants that they can successfully grow regardless of their gardening experience.
Additionally, summer trials help us determine what products to offer in our catalog. With access to nearly all breeders’ genetics, our summer trials help us ensure that we’re offering the highest quality plants to our customers.
This process is good for the entire industry. It challenges the breeders to introduce high-quality varieties. It helps retails make informed decisions about what to sell to their own customers. If they know they are buying from a rooting station that has fully vetted what is in the catalog, they can choose with confidence.
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