Best New Plant of 2024 revealed at BBC Gardeners’ World Live!
The annual BBC Gardeners’ World Live event kicked off this week in Birmingham and tens of thousands of green-fingered attendees were amongst the first to find out the identity of the Best New Plant 2024.
This year, the prestigious title was awarded to Hydrangea macrophylla First Editions® Eclipse®, which won Hereford’s Allensmore Nurseries the sought after Peter Seabrook Award.
The plant is eye-catching for its deep purple disease-resistant foliage, which doesn’t lose its colour, and its crimson rimmed flowers.
The Peter Seabrook Award celebrates the late British gardening writer and broadcaster, who presented BBC programmes including Gardeners’ World from 1975.
Hydrangea macrophylla First Editions® Eclipse® won Hereford’s Allensmore Nurseries the sought after Peter Seabrook Award at BBC Gardeners’ World Live in Birmingham
The Award is offered to new plants that were not on sale to the public before 13th June 2024, and to be eligible they had to be new varieties, colour breaks or characteristics that improve on an existing variety.
There are about 80 wild species, many with great garden value, including Hydrangea macrophylla – the most popular.
After centuries of breeding, H. macrophylla varieties come in ‘mop-head’ types with large, rounded flower heads as well as lace-caps.
The name is derived from Hydra – the multi-headed Greek monster slain by Heracles – not from ‘hydro’.
The most colourful parts on mopheads are sterile bracts, each arranged in fours to make flower-like shapes. The true flowers are tiny and hidden among the bracts. With lacecap varieties, true flowers make up the centres, which are surrounded by an outer ring of bracts.
The new Hydrangeas macrophylla First Editions® Eclipse® has disease-resistant foliage, which keeps its deep purple colour throughout a long flowering season.
Blooms have a cherry colour at the edge and a touch of lime green in the centre, and the plant is the first ever truly dark-leaved mophead hydrangea.
Hydrangeas look their best in late summer. But they produce early flowers, too, and if well managed the shrubs can bloom from June to November.
It’s recommended you grow them in rich fertile, moist soil with compost added before you plant, or in large tubs.
Their buds form in late summer and the spent flowers form an important protective layer for them, so they should not be removed until after the last frosts.
When you do prune, cut back to the first pair of healthy buds. Any old, crossing or dead wood should be cut right back to the base of the shrub.
