Those of us in the business of growing plants for a living place most of our wholesale orders of seeds, bare root stock, and liners in the early fall. My major orders were turned in by the end of October and I’ve already received many boxes of seeds. Despite that, I’m not immune to the colorful retail seed catalogs that keep arriving in my mailbox. This year, while thumbing through the Burpee catalog, I found a gaillardia in a color I’ve never seen offered before: Pink. Gaillardia aristata, a plant native to Colorado, is commonly found in bright yellow and red. A number of years ago, when pink was THE fashion color, customer after customer asked us for pink flowers. We’d show them a great gaillardia in full bloom and they’d say “don’t you have that in pink?” At a Farmer’s Market in Acacia Park, a woman was looking at the gaillardias and said, “I have a bunch of these in my yard, in all different colors.” I said, “Too bad you don’t have them in pink, that’s what everyone wants.” She said, “I do have a pink one.” I was shocked. I think I scared her because I had such a strong reaction. “You have a PINK one? Really? I’ve never seen one in that color. I need that plant.” She backed away a couple of steps. “It’s not just a faded red, it’s really pink?” I demanded. “Where do you live, could I come see it? Or could you bring a flower from it here next week, to the market?” She said, “I’ll try,” and turned and ran off.
The next week she was conspicuously absent from the market, but the week after that she brought a picture of it. It definitely looked pink, a nice hot pink with a creamy colored edge. I said, without a clue that I was further scaring her, “You know this plant could be really valuable. This is an interesting color break. You could maybe patent it and make millions.” No hyperbole was too great for my enthusiastic chatter. “You know who would know, Panayoti Kelaidis at the Denver Botanic Gardens. You should talk to him about this”. I was sort of shouting the last part as she once again backed away from me. The crush of the market allowed her to escape and I didn’t get her name or any more information.
Weeks passed with no sighting of the Pink Gaillardia woman. I reflected on the conversation and realized that she might’ve thought that I was a) crazy; b)intent on stealing her plant; c) a weird plant stalker; d) all of the above and a person to be avoided. Later that summer she approached our stand at the market and said, “Remember me? I have a pink gaillardia in my garden?” I kept myself from screaming “Remember you? I dream about you and that pink gaillardia!” and said, merely, “um, yes.” She told me she’d talked to Panayoti and he was going to help her find out more about propagating her plant and whether it was patentable. I wished her well.
Even later that summer I saw her again, and she told me that a hailstorm had destroyed the gaillardia! Now that the pink gaillardia was gone, she no longer saw me as a potential plant thief, but as someone to commiserate with—someone who knew what she’d lost. She had saved some seeds but she didn’t know if they would come true. That was the anticlimactic end to that experience until a few years later I got a postcard from her saying she’d retired from teaching and was moving to the Western Slope. She’d been unable to reproduce the pink gaillardia, but hadn’t given up hope. By then pink wasn’t the high demand color it had been and I’d moved on. But this week, seeing that pink gaillardia in Burpee’s….it brought it all back.
I called their 800 number and ordered it. How could I not?
