Garden Mum ‘Madeline’This Chrysanthemum caught my eye while I was at the garden center last week. I was looking at some plants and also wanted to get a few pictures of any late blooming stuff they might have. It was Lexington Gardens in Newtown, CT. It is a wonderful place that often stocks rare and unusual plant material. They have a great greenhouse and a lot of crafty stuff. I wasn’t prepared for them having the Christmas displays up, although I remembered after that during my brief retail nursery career that everything was seasonal and had to be rotated in and out quickly.
‘Madeline’ is a new mum from Yoder Brothers and is from their Prophets series of garden mums. It is actually a whole new flower form called ‘quilled anemone’. The flowers are also kind of a unique color, not what I would call a bicolor or two tone but it has that effect. According to the Yoder Brothers website there “five basic flower forms are commonly found in garden mums: button, daisy, decorative, pompon and spider (or quill). There can also be variations to these forms, such as spoon-tipped.”
Yoder Brothers
Mums seem to one of those plants that you either like or hate. I have read a lot of negative comments and posts on them in various garden blogs. For me they will always be part of the fall garden experience and in general they add a lot of color to the season in this area. With so many colors, types, shapes and habits it is surprising that people can’t find something to like. That is without even taking in the more exotic, rare and perennial forms of Chrysanthemum.
