tall florists' cineraria shortage

[ritaxis]

Is this happening elsewhere, or only in California? When I look at plants in the nursery, tall cut-flower and bedding plants have all been bred to have thick, coarse, short stems and oversized, coarse flowers. It's difficult to find flower and bedding plants with the graceful stems and just-right sized flowers I'm accustomed to.

One thing I know has happened: nobody's selling senecio stellata (cineraria stellata, florists'cineraria) anywhere at all. Except Annie's Annuals is selling them for seven dollars a plant and Nichols has seed packets. I'm going to order the Nichols seeds but I'm waiting for a little while to see if I can possibly think of anything else they have that I want, so the shipping doesn't turn out to be more than the seeds.

Cineraria (which is what I always called it until I started looking for it and discovered that it wasn't the right name) is the signature Bay Area plant(both SF and Monterey Bay Areas). It doesn't need sun, it thrives on very modest water (it celebrates when it gets a little more), it blooms for a long time, it self-sows but isn't particularly invasive, it doesn't get eaten up too much or mildewy much, and it's pretty. It has the color effect of the nasty old-fashioned hydrangeas (only better), and it has a much more graceful growth habit. Personally, I only like hydrangeas when they have been drawn by some liar with Art Nouveau sensibilities. In the flesh, they are stodgy, space-filling shrubs for people who don't really like plants. Everything about them is graceless and chunky. Unfortunately, they also thrive on neglect, don't care about soil or light, and bloom all year long, so people grow them all over the place. I don't know. Maybe they're frost tender or something, so you people in less reasonable climates might not be afflicted with them. Did I mention that hydrangeas also harbor snails which emerge to eat everything else but seem to leave the hydrangeas alone?

Cinerarias, on the other hand, rock. My patch does self-sow but it has violets and oxalis to contend with and I wanted to bring in some reinforcements, like I do with the naturalized parsley bed.

Yes, I've finally started gardening for the year. I've cleared out a couple of cubic meters of biomass, mostly oxalis but also dock and shrub prunings, planted mostly flowers but some salad rocket and radishes as well, seeds as well as small plants. I have maybe cleared up ten percent of the back yard. Yes. There's that much biomass this time of year. I could permanently eradicate the oxalis and not have to contend with this, but not without damaging the soil and my back.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

How many plants were you looking at, 20 1 gallons? 32 4" pots? What?

Um.

I was looking for a six-pack of starts, or maybe two. Or a packet of seeds.

You do realize this is hilarious, don't you?

[blackoakdreams.livejournal.com]

A little. I have some trouble with scale when it comes to plants now. My clients buy plants by the dozens. Which means I purchase plants by the hundreds. That was really the smallest order I could imagine.

I must have mentioned to you at some point that I'm a buyer for a plant brokerage company, didn't I? And that I'm assigned to the Bay Area market? Well, maybe not that, that's a relatively new development, but the essentials had to be there, right?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I knew you were a plant buyer, but I thought you worked for a large commercial landscaping outfit, and I also kind of thought you were working in SoCal. I don't know why, but I had this vision of a territory that stretched from San Diego to Santa Maria or maybe SLO.

That's a very cool job you have there. You could have influence! You could eradicate invasives! Push drought-tolerance! Push shade tolerance! Push the two together (very convenient for urban gardens).

[blackoakdreams.livejournal.com]

Oh, I work in SoCal, but I'm still the junior buyer for the Bay area, based from our satellite yard up there. The territory you envision roughly equals the area for our main office. I don't think I'll be doing it for much longer, but I'll do what I can. Really though, the market is being altered by the Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe's, and Target market, and the pay-by-scan system for plants. Most of the lower priced, volume growers are geared towards serving that, and they are pushing plants that have the best chance of looking good until someone walks into Lowe's and buys the plant, which is the point when the Lowe's supplier gets paid. It's perhaps inevitable that the plant industry would be shaped this way, but the polarization between chain-retail driven growers and landscape driven growers, which specialize in unique plants that they can charge whatever the want (and for survival have) to charge for, is increasing. My company every so often gets visited by those corporations, and that honestly scares the crap out of me, because if we go that route we'll alienate our base clientèle of landscapers and the vendors that cater to them. We sort of straddle the market, in that we can get the big boy vendors to cater to us, but serve (especially in the Bay area) the niche buyers.

I'm not quite sure how I wandered into that lecture, but I'm just going to leave it up anyways. Just know I plan on quitting soon, both because I don't know plants to well and so I'm a bit out-classed by my duties--though it shocks me how well I manage anyways--and because my company seems to be rapidly expanding beyond it's capacity to cope. And summer is coming.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It's interesting how plants are sold. In Santa Cruz, most of the plants are sold in nurseries, and the nurseries are either specialties or departments of hardware-building supplies chains like OSH and Lumberman's. (that last is new in the area, they bought out a local independent of course) In Watsonville -- twelkve miles away -- there some great huge wholesale agricultural nurseries and a few tiny places that are also florist shops, and one old-time nursery (where I actually bought some of my baby trees back before the Ice Age). Other than that, plants are sold in a lot of huge chains -- Long's, OSH (does it count as huge yet?), Home Depot, grocery chains, KMart. And those chains are the place where the plants are turning into ugly coarse freaks, foreshortened in the stem and flowers full of acromegaly and nobody pays attention to branching patterns and leaves at all.

What do you think you're going to do next? I'm kind of stymied myself (I think because of my own head thing), so I always like to hear about other people's transitions.