Who is going to be the Next Garden Idol?

“Did you really believe you could become the American Idol? Well, then, you’re deaf.”
- Simon Cowell of FOX’s American Idol

Earlier this week, I presented four brand new plants at The Garden Idol new plant session, which was part of the ANLA (American Nursery & Landscape Association) Management Clinic in Louisville, Kentucky and it rocked the house!

It was new and a little bit scary, and there were high expectations from the organizers to step up the way new plants are presented.

We certainly stepped it up. Was it successful? Who knows? Do more people know who I am? Do they know more about my new introductions? For sure!

It’s all too new and I have no idea how to measure this new stardom. The ANLA organizers wanted to have a new plants session where people would get up in front of the audience and talk about their new introductions, but they wanted something totally different. They wanted it to be entertaining, so they asked us to be creative, but they also added a twist.

Normally (I’ve done hundreds of these presentations…) you stand up in front of a group and you talk about your new plant, showing pictures and telling the audience about all of its unique qualities. You try and convince them this new plant is better than anything on the market. This time was different.

The organizers decided to mock the reality TV show American Idol. They made a mock logo that looked just like it, except it said Garden Idol. Get it? Garden Idol…he-he.

They used the American Idol music and they even had celebrity judges commenting on each presentation. To top it off, they talked Grower Talk’s magazine editor, Chris Beytes, into performing as a Ryan Secrest-like master of ceremonies for the event.

It was pretty cool.

I decided to dress up in a different costume for each of my four presentations. I brought an extra large suitcase with me to hold it all. The wigs took up a lot of space. I wonder if George Washington had this much luggage?

They asked us to make an otherwise boring session exciting and interactive, so I chose to play music and dance for two, dress southern-style and present one in my best southern accent, wear really uncomfortable, plastic elf ears for one, and finish it up groovy-like and hippie.

The plants I chose to present were: a coneflower named Echinacea purpurea ‘Milkshake’, a new cardinal flower called Lobelia cardinalis ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’, a tiny little Stoke’s aster we call Stokesia laevis ‘Elf’, and a perennial sunflower-blooming machine named Helianthus x multiflorus ‘Sunshine Daydream’.

For Milkshake, I chose a song from the early 2000’s called Milkshake Song by Kellis. It’s a dance song, so I had to shake it a bit. I wore a white Barbie meets Lady Gaga wig and Jackie-O sunglasses to accompany my opening photo of Barbie wearing a dress fashioned out of Milkshake blooms and petals by one of my oh-so talented horticulturist friends at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Irvin Etienne. Thanks Irvin!

The song states, “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard”, so I shook my milkshake and made the crowd laugh. (Funny side note: I practiced shaking my milkshake in the mirror so I could see what a fool I’d be making of myself, in preparation for the comments.)

I was competing with Tim Wood from Spring Meadow Nursery, a part of Proven Winners, or as he calls himself, the Plant Hunter. The Plantweenie vs. the Plant Hunter. (For those of you who don’t know, on Twitter my name is @plantweenie) I tweeted “Plantweenie vs. the Plant Hunter…bring it on!” right before the competition. The Plant Hunter presented his new introductionHydrangea arborescens ‘NCHAI’ Invincibelle Spirit, a lovely new pink flowered selection of our native hydrangea. A percentage of sales from this plant will be donated to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. For every plant sold, $1 is donated.

After we both presented, we were judged. The judges wanted to know why I wasn’t dressed like the Barbie in the picture. As if…

They liked my plant, but I think they really liked the cause associated with his hydrangea. I explained how I previously got into trouble wearing a coconut bra and a grass skirt while presentingEchinacea purpurea ‘Coconut Lime’, and that I like to keep things on the up and up. No need to scare the breeders.

I presented Lobelia ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ in my best Sunday dress (red of course), a dowdy straw hat and spoke in my best southern tongue. As you can imagine, I mentioned Towanda.

Then there was Stokesia ‘Elf’ which I presented wearing an elf hat and ears, all the while referencing the shortness of this plant as many times as I could to make my point. Even Will Farrell in the movie Elf made an appearance.

And last, but certainly not least, for my groovy friends at North Creek Nursery, who found Helianthus ‘Sunshine Daydream’, I twirled and danced in my grooviest outfit to the melodic beat of the Grateful Dead’s beloved Sunshine Daydream.

I went for a groovy outfit instead of a hippie chic outfit, donning canary yellow go-go boots and a large, reddish-brown “fro” wig. With a tie-died background to all my slides, the crowd was certainly feelin’ the groove. They totally got into the music and would have rushed the stage to join me as fellow twirlers, (total Deadhead reference here – sorry if you’ve never been) had the music played longer.

The crowd voted and sadly, none of my plants won. Hydrangea paniculata ‘Renhy’ Vanilla Strawberry from Bailey Nurseries won the event vote. Jonathon Pederson from Baileys presented Vanilla Strawberry. He started his presentation in a black hoodie, and sunglasses mocking the Pants on the Ground singer from American Idol. Jonathon’s version of this viral rap was titled “Plants on the Ground”.

It was a catchy ditty, with the following lyrics:

Plants on the ground, Plants on the Ground
Lookin’ like FOOLS with your plants on the ground!
Get ‘em on a bench, Use P.O.P. (point of purchase…aka signs and posters and stuff that identifies a plant)
You’ll be looking like heroes with your plants on a table.

You will have the chance to vote online once the videos are posted. I’ll send the link out in The Weeding Gnome as soon as I get it from the folks at ANLA. Vote often and please vote for Plants Nouveau plants.

You can also follow Plants Nouveau on Facebook and Twitter to find out the latest. Click here to become a Facebook Fan of Plants Nouveau. To follow me, the plantweenie on Twitter, just log into Twitter and search for @plantweenie to follow my Tweets.

I hope you enjoy the plants I presented. It was a hoot and the group had fun rushing the stage to sing Plants on the Ground at the end. I’m sure that’ll all be in the forthcoming video. I’ll be patiently waiting to be embarrassed in front of the entire nursery industry.

They asked for exciting, right?

Tweets, tweeting, friending, facebook fan pages…defining these terms and much more on the new, enticing world of Social Media, plus lots more on what I learned this week in the clinic in next week’s issue.

Sorry this is a bit late… it’s snowing buckets here in Baltimore. We’ll be shoveling this very heavy, wet snow for a while. Hopefully we’ll finish just in time to watch the Super Bowl. We’ll be wearing our beads and rooting for the Saints, since no true Baltimorean should root for the Colts. They left us in the middle of the night. Enough said.

Go Saints!

Happy Weeding!

Angela Treadwell Palmer
President, Plants Nouveau

P.S. This week’s gnome picture was given to us by one of our fans at Terrapin Trading Company in Victoria, BC. They sell gnomes…