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Colourful spikes waving in the wind, delicate scents, and the soothing sounds of buzzing and chirping… Salvia brings a calming and relaxing vibe to any outdoor living space. It speaks to gardeners and landscapers who want to create low-maintenance, eco-friendly environments. With their natural colours and vertical textures Salvias offer a stylish twist on Mediterranean and cottage garden decors.
As Salvia fits in a whole range of ongoing garden trends, it makes total sense for Fleuroselect to make it its mission this year to educate, inspire and dazzle garden lovers worldwide with the beauty of Salvia. The international Home Garden Association (based in the Netherlands) has declared 2023 as The Year of the Salvia.
HilverdaFlorist is proud breeder of the successful Salvia Salgoon® Series. We support Fleuroselect and celebrate the Year of the Salvia with extensive plantings of our Salgoon® Series in public parks and gardens in England, Germany, the Netherlands and France. Together we show you the latest varieties and the unique features of our extraordinary Salvias. Find out more about Salvia Salgoon® and its power to bring colour and liveliness to your garden.
Visit the most amazing parks and gardens in Europe and find Salvia Salgoon®
Egapark in Erfurt, Germany
Insel Mainau in Mainau, Germany
RHS Garden Harlow Carr in Harrogate, United Kingdom
RHS Garden, Hyde Hall in Chelmsford, Essex, United Kingdom
De Garden in Enkhuizen, the Netherlands
Jardin des Plantes in Paris, France
Are you visiting any of these gardens this season? Don’t forget to SNAP, TAG and SHARE your Salvia selfie using #salviaSalgoon / @hilverdaflorist and we will make sure to repost.
Why choose Salvia Salgoon® for your garden
The Salvia family consists of over 900 species. Salvia Salgoon® is an interspecific hybrid – the result of our breeders combining the best genetic material of different Salvia species to create a series with unique characteristics. The Salgoon® Series truly makes a difference when it comes to garden performance. Each variety of the series forms strong, resilient plants with many firm, well-filled flower spikes. Salgoon® is known to be drought and heat tolerant, and flowers profusely from spring to frost. Growers can produce Salgoon® in a short time, so you will be able to find them in garden centers as one of the earliest Salvias, from mid spring onwards.
The Salgoon® Series contains a spectacular range of colours, varying from deep purple to lavender, blue and pink. Due to Salgoon®’s dark green foliage and contrasting calyxes, these vibrant colours stand out even more. Take notice, as you are bound to see Salvia Salgoon® Lake Garda and Strawberry Lake pop up everywhere this season. Both varieties match perfectly with Pantone’s 2023 Color of the Year – Viva Magenta.
Times have past that starting a cultivation journey with stage 3 tissue culture plants should be considered complicated, difficult and only for specialized self-rooting nurseries. As the benefits of tissue culture plants are obvious, input and shipping costs keep increasing and growers keep developing themselves, starting plants from stage 3 TC is gaining popularity and becoming more common.
For growers with little or no experience with stage 3 planting, Garvinea® is the product you want to start off with. HilverdaFlorist supplies stage 3 plants that are ready to enter stage 4 for acclimating, hardening and creating liners. You won’t get a fragile, little clump of cells. Garvinea® stage 3 plants are healthy, uniform, vigorous and resilient, with substantial roots and leaves. This makes transplanting them into liners easy, quick and truly doable for growers who are already familiar with starting crops from URC or seed.
This article was originally created for Greenhouse Grower.
There have been many advances in breeding technology over the past years, including the development of new techniques for improving the genetics and characteristics of new varieties. The HilverdaFlorist team is always focused on innovation and optimization which makes it possible to breed more efficiently, sustainable and with greater precision, allowing for the development of crops that can help to meet the needs of the market.
Developing new varieties
HilverdaFlorist has a wide range of Pot-, Patio- and Garden varieties in Alstroemeria, Dianthus, Echinacea, Gerbera, Helleborus and Salvia. The assortment consists of crops that have been bred for decades to relatively new products. Products that are recently presented to the market require different attention compared to the crops that have been around for a longer time.
Gerbera and Dianthus are crops that have been part of the product range for decades. The breeders of HilverdaFlorist have been working on these varieties for years. As a result of the high level of performance of these crops improvements might sometimes be relatively small, but certainly not less important. With crops like these HilverdaFlorist focuses on improvement by consolidation.
With relatively new series such as Echinacea MOOODZ® and Salvia Salgoon®, the focus is more on fundamental aspects and establishing these crops in the market. This creates opportunities for potential growth. To respond to this, HilverdaFlorist sets these markets as key areas of focus at this time. The introduction of new, improved crops is very important for HilverdaFlorist. The team of breeders is constantly looking for new opportunities to diversify and differentiate.
Main goals and challenges
One of the most important themes at the moment is sustainability. This includes improving genetic resistance of plants. Genetic resistance is a sustainable solution to deal with the increasing pressure of diseases and pests. HilverdaFlorist strives to develop robust plants that can withstand various circumstances and survive even longer with fewer resources. It is important to work more from a sustainability and resilience perspective.
When working towards more sustainable products, there are of course challenges. Working on genetic resistance takes a lot of time and bioassays often are difficult, since they can give a lot of variation. But, nonetheless it is something we focus on and strive to optimize.
Optimalisation for outdoor growth
HilverdaFlorist focuses on optimizing outdoor growth for the series Gerbera Garvinea®, Echinacea MOOODZ® and Salvia Salgoon®. This contributes to the resistance to diseases, pests, and stress factors. HilverdaFlorist is working on genetic compactness which can have important implications for plant growth and development, as well as for the plant’s ability to adapt to different environmental conditions. This is done without the use of PGR treatments. To achieve this, more outdoor trials are being set up. By doing this, robustness and resilience in the crops can be better selected. This way, HilverdaFlorist strives to test the value of the plant, as it is grown by the consumer, in order to deliver the ultimate and reliable product for the consumer.
Molecular marker breeding technology
HilverdaFlorist values the traditional art of breeding, but is always up to date when it comes to innovative techniques. Currently, there are developments with marker-assisted breeding. This is a technique that uses molecular markers to identify and select plants with desirable characteristics. These markers are then used to breed plants with the desired characteristics by selecting individuals with the relevant. This method makes it possible to work more precise and to produce plants with improved characteristics such as disease resistance more efficiently and effectively.
Want to know more about what’s happening at HilverdaFlorist? Keep an eye on our knowledge base for all the latest news!
Garden trends come and go over the years. Every year brings fresh and innovative garden trends to transform your garden or patio into a true paradise. In this article, we will discuss garden trends for 2023 that catched our eye. Let’s have a look into several movements that are shaping the world of plant breeding.
Sustainable gardening
One of the most significant trends in gardening today is sustainability. Our society is increasingly looking for ways to reduce environmental impact and create gardens that are more self-sustaining. HilverdaFlorist is focussing on sustainable products to contribute to a flourishing, green future. This is done by optimizing the genetic resistance of plants.
Genetic resistance is a sustainable solution to deal with the increasing pressure of diseases and pests. HilverdaFlorist strives to develop robust plants that can withstand various circumstances and survive even longer with fewer resources. It is important to work more from a sustainability and resilience perspective.
Pollinator gardens
There is a growing concern about the disappearance of pollinators such as bees and butterflies. Gardeners are increasingly looking for ways to support these important creatures. Pollination gardens are becoming increasingly popular to encourage these little visitors into our gardens. Salvia, for example, is a true pollinator magnet.
HilverdaFlorist is proud breeder of the successful Salvia Salgoon® Series. As diversity is key, combine Salvias with other pollinator favorites like, Echinacea MOOODZ® and Garvinea® Garden Gerberas. Both series offer flowers with plenty of nectar and pollen, and a wide range of colours.
Perhaps experimenting with different colours or buying a plant you haven’t seenbefore, right? Be inspired by the one and only true garden Gerbera: Garvinea®. Garvineas are to be similar to the well-known cut flower Gerberas you will find at your florists. The big difference is that Garvinea® is a true garden plant, which you can put in soil or in a container. Outdoors it produces an enormous amount of flowers during three seasons of the year – from early Spring to the first frost.
From Gerbera to Garvinea®
Although Gerbera and Garvinea® are different in use and application, they have the same origin. The ancestors of the famous cut flower Gerbera are originally from Asia, South Africaand Tasmania. They mainly grow in areas with humid summers and dry winters. These colourful composites are also called ‘African daisies’. The first Gerbera was discovered in 1737, but it only started to raise interest at the end of the 19 th century in Europe when enthusiastic plant hunters discovered the species Gerbera jamesonii in South Africa. Since then they have become far removed from there ‘roots’, but are definitely here to stay! Gerbera and Dianthus are crops that have been part of the product range for decades.
This Gerbera, with orange-yellow flowers, is the mother of all cut flower and pot plant Gerberas. With the Rose and Tulip there are among the largest flower culture export products from the Netherlands. The Geberas are cultivated using sophisticated methods and are specially selected for their performance in a vase and because of this they are totally unsuitable for outdoor use in soil.
However, by re-discovering Gerberas which grow in nature, where exactly they grow in the wild and which properties botanic species have, we have managed to develop a new type of Gerbera that is indeed suitable for garden use. This hardy Gerbera was named Garvinea®. Garvinea® is a bred variety, that doesn’t occur in nature, but it does reunite the properties of several Gerbera species from all over the world.
Dwarsweg 15, De Kwakel 
