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Plant Life By Valerie Easton

For Whom The Bells Toll

In the bevy of heucheras, beasts lurk among the beauties

I'VE BEEN HAPPILY sampling all those luscious new heucheras, but was given pause recently when a 94-year-old gardener asked me testily, "Do we really need 64 different heucheras?"

Good point. While heucheras come in a tempting variety of colors and leaf shapes, some have proved far more garden-worthy than others. I've had the lovely, russet-leafed Heuchera 'Amber Waves' melt away into nothing. Yet the green and maroon H. 'Green Spice' is dependably evergreen in a small pot.

How to distinguish the best from the not-so-good in the deluge of new heucheras?

It's hard not to indulge in these ultimate foliage plants, because they're showy yet conveniently small and tidy. They're a perfect size for urban gardens, balconies, containers and the fronts of borders. The leaves are scalloped, ruffled, veined and splashed in colors from pink through lime to darkest purple and even ebony. Who can resist?

While these flashy heucheras are newcomers, their ancestry is long. Known as coral bells, these woodland plants were native to the forests of Eastern North America, used by Native Americans to treat ulcers and sores. Introduced into horticulture by an English nurseryman in 1656, heucheras were the kind of plants gardeners tucked beneath shrubs to carpet the ground with their soft little leaves and pale flower spikes. Who would have thought that such wildly popular plants could come from such inauspicious beginnings?

Dan Heims at Terra Nova Nurseries in Canby, Ore., for one. Heims says he has long indulged in sport fishing, meaning that he wanders through nurseries looking for an unusual variegated branch or leaf. In the late 1980s he came upon a Heuchera sanguinea with brilliantly variegated leaves, and it spurred his prolific heuchera breeding. Now Heims trolls the world in search of new genetic material. In 15 years Terra Nova has grown to more than 15 acres, 100,000 square feet of greenhouse and 50 employees.

Part of the success must surely be based on Heims' ability to come up with so many good plant names, including 'Plum Pudding,' 'Champagne Bubbles,' 'Strawberry Swirl,' 'Mint Frost,' 'Chocolate Ruffles' and 'Peach Flambé,' which appeal to visual imagery and our taste buds as much as the actual plants appeal to our eyes.

But is Heims cranking the plants out too quickly? And with so many new ones, is there much difference between cultivars? A nurseryman complains that the mega-breeding fast path doesn't allow for enough testing, and you end up with heucheras prone to rust and other problems. This is the story I heard from many experts. Plant explorer Dan Hinkley says he's fallen out with heucheras because so many look ratty in winter and are susceptible to root weevil. He's afraid the new introductions are growing weaker, citing the older heucheras like 'Chocolate Veil' as the best of the bunch. Despite heuchera drawbacks, designers Withey and Price use the chartreuse H. 'Lime Ricky' and the matte black H. 'Obsidian' and some of the salmon-colored ones like H. 'Marmalade' and 'Peach Flambé.' They consider them to be biennials or triennials, and don't expect them to last long.

Perhaps the key to success with all these fancy new heucheras is to lower our expectations. If you remember all the weather vagaries, disease and insects you contend with, maybe you can enjoy the variety and frilly beauty offered by all the new heucheras for the short run. And maybe that's why we need all 64 kinds.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. John Lok is a Seattle Times staff photographer.