| Hawksridge Farms News & Happenings Current Attractions Our Arboretum Availability Our Catalog Buyer's Guidelines Contact Us Links Site Map Open House 2010  Hydrangea 'Phantom'  Hydrangea 'Phantom' | News & Happenings We have been working hard updating and giving our website a new look. We hope you enjoy it and use it quite often. These remain challenging times for all of us in this industry and for some of the oldtimers like me, we have never seen anything quite like this, and certainly nothing that has lasted this long. Saying that, we are still very optimistic about the future of the nursery business. I wanted to do something different and decided to move away from my travels and update you on some of the new plants we are working on and introducing. I will do this occassionally to give you a look at what's new. We have two new Hydrangeas, a Physocarpus and a Weigela featured. We are just beginning to offer these plants, and thought they would be great alternatives to some of the branded products on the market. No colored containers, no fancy tags required, although we do have great picture tags available if requested for the garden centers, and our colored tags are free! We understand that most of our landscapers or landscape customers are not the least bit interested in paying the extras for the branded products. They just want good landscape plants at a good price. The first Hydrangea we want to feature is a great paniculata named 'Phantom'. The 'Phantom' is a sister seedling to 'Limelight'(TM). As one of our customers and fellow plant enthusiast (nut?)Heidi Hesslein from Pleasant Run Nursery said, "The 'Phantom looks like a 'LImelight'(TM) on steroids." Their performance for us this summer has been amazing! Very large flowers on stury stems has attracted lots of attention. The first word out of everyone's mouth that visited and saw them in full flower this summer was WOW! The next Hydrangea we would like to introduce you to is another paniculata named 'Silver Dollar'. It is smaller and more compact than 'Phantom' but very floriferous. I was able to attend the International Hydrangea Society Meeting in Ghent, Belgium in 2007 and these were the most talked about plants and received the best reviews on the tours. Dr. Dirr gives them both very good reviews in his latest manual and he was just as impressed as everyone else at the Hydrangea meeting in Belgium. Physocarpus 'Center Glow'(R) is a new plant for us and was developed by the Landscape Plant Development Center as a cross between Diabolo(TM) and Dart's Gold. We purchased our liners from Carlton Plants in Oregon for the first time this year and out of the three purple foliaged varieties we grew, we were most impressed with these. The light colored leaves in the tips of the plant are very striking with white tinged pinkish flowers. A very easy plant to keep well shaped in a container, but grows fast. The last plant I want to talk about is Weigela Minor Black. We purchased this plant from Holland last year and sold limited numbers last fall. We are trying to build up stock on this one, as it is by far, the best dark foliage one we have grown and we have tried them all. The color on Minor Black has held up much better in our summer heat. I would also like to take this opportunity to let you know about our upcoming Open House. Click on the link to the left and be sure to pre-register. We hope you can make it! | Hawksridge Farms PO Box 3349 Hickory, NC 28603 (800)874-4216 Fax(828)294-4299 Physical Address: 4243 S. NC 127 Hwy Hickory, NC 28602  Hydrangea 'Silver Dollar'  Weigela Minor Black  Physocarpus 'Center Glow'(R) |