I can't help but get into this!
Medinac & I have been exchanging ideas about her Peach Flambee (and I see that I was way behind the curve on that!).
I was born and grew up in scintillating Spokane, and the climate where I live now is, if anything, a bit harsher, with more marked contrasts from Summer to Winter and sunshine more like Yakima than Spokane.
In the midst of this, my new Marmalade is thriving! It gets 0 to 1/2 hr of shade per day! It's fantastic! Nearby, Peach Flambee may get 2 - 4 hrs of shade. It's doing fine, although not as spectacular as Marmalade.
Here are some photos. We are looking just a bit south of east on the bigger shots.
Now, I know that things are usually more expensive here, but I paid about $15.00 for each of these plants. Medinac, I would not pay $8.00 on Ebay for 1 yr plants.
With these patented plants, you get what you pay for. And that's a fact! TNN & Dan Heims invest a LOT in developing their plants and ensuring quality. Heims is very quick to withdraw weak cultivars from the trade when they don't live up in home gardens to their performance in trial gardens. If you buy off eBay, you are probably buying pirated plants. If the plants you buy in your local nursery don't have the TNN or Primrose Path or Labroye "etiquettes" (what's that in American? "plant labels"? like the ones you can see on their websites), there's a good chance you bought pirated plants. If you DID buy patented hybrids and they have bizarre growth/behaviour patterns, I encourage you to write the originating nursery. Thay don't want bad plants around. They will use your info to decide to withdraw a plant or to improve it. The nurseries developing these new hybrid heucheras are all still small, family, human-scale businesses (with often huge investments). They will almost certainly not just listen and reply to your complaints if fairly presented; if the plants really were theirs, they will likely replace them.
In my local garden store, Caramel costs Euros 30,00. That's US$ 47.50. But it's a real Caramel.
So I shopped around for my Caramel. I finally paid Euros 8.00 (about US$ 15.00). It wasn't a gallon pot, but it was healthy and vigorous AND was grown by a nursery licensed by TNN to produce it.
I would argue that buying $8.00 plants off eBay encourages piracy, the distribution of poorly propagated plants (often bearing odd diseases) and a cynicism about new hybrid plants, whereas far fewer problems are encountered when buying "the real thing".
And, no, just because it is sold at Wal-Mart, Lowes, Home Depot or another of those disreputable American mass marketers is NO GUARANTEE that the plant is of legitimate parentage. After all, what percentage of their products is "Made in China"? [Last time I was in the States, I bought a packet of bean seed at Home Depot, only to read on the packet when I got home "Product of China".] This is not a joke. People are being ripped off by being sold "labelled" plants without the nursery labels. They are fakes! They fall apart just like Louis Vuitton bags bought on the street in New York do. It's not then the "plant's" fault.
Just an observation.
And here's the photos.
Potagere
