All about plants

As your national nursery trade publication, our main goal is to be useful. We aim to provide content you can use to improve your wholesale nursery business. It’s right there in our mission statement: “We provide the latest production, marketing and business management tips to help growers increase their profits.”

We try to help you run your business in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it’s by publishing an article about how nurseries can circumvent labor issues by automating a repetitive task. Or how newcomers like Moss Robotics are solving long-standing hurdles like how to handle inventory management in a fast and accurate fashion. Watch for that in an upcoming issue.

But this month’s issue of Nursery Management isn’t so much about the “running a business” part of nursery management. It’s 100% focused on the plants.

Our cover story is from the fine folks at the American Rose Trials for Sustainability, or A.R.T.S. They have compiled a list of the 13 new roses that met their lofty standards.

We are proud to continue publishing articles from our long-running contributing editor, Michael A. Dirr. In March, the legendary plantsman and author was inducted into the Georgia Agricultural Hall of Fame, and he asked me to estimate the number of articles he’s written for Nursery Management over the years. I was able to dig up more than40 articles in our archives. You can do the same at nurserymag.com, if you’re in the mood to wander through Dr. Dirr’s treatises on underappreciated plants, noble trees and the genus with which he’s perhaps most prominently associated: Hydrangea. Read his perspective on the trade’s latest hydrangea introductions.

For those of us in northern climates, it’s important to know if a shrub can take tough winters and humid summers. That’s why breeders partner with The University of Minnesota’s West Central Research and Outreach Center to trial their plants. Emily Moore, director of horticulture research at WCROC, shares her findings.

What new plants are your favorites? Are you brave enough to disagree with Dr. Dirr’s assessments? Tell me all about it at the email below.