Hypericum: Cold Hardy Foliage

Here is a nice discovery from this fall and winter!

While our hypericum crop was not able to squeeze in a second berry harvest, it has continued to produce beautiful, cold hardy foliage that has been great for filling out our offerings the last few weeks.

In the summer, hypericum foliage is wilty if harvested prior to the berry harvest. It’s important that we wait until each stem’s flowers have all turned to berries before we cut from the plants. We assumed (logically) the same would be true for the foliage later in the season.

But we’ve learned otherwise. A a new staff member took a few stems when she put together her Friday flower bouquet and reported back to us that they foliage was holding up beautifully at home. This is another benefit of encouraging experimentation and making sure you and your team members are enjoying flowers at home, too. We’ve learned a lot about our products by testing them at home.

We did another vase test here in our studio to be sure we could replicate the long vase life and sure enough, we could! Having this foliage to add to our otherwise straight lily or mum bouquets this fall has been wonderful.

We’ve dipped down several times into the low 20s at night. We see some tips of the hypericum foliage drooping from the cold, but many still look great and we will continue to use them as long as we can.

Next year, we’ll consider covering our plants with some frost cloth on the coldest nights in November and December to prolong the foliage harvest even more. We may even pot some up this week and see how they do in our minimally heated propagation tunnel this winter.

Either way, we feel fortunate to be benefitting from these beautiful stems this time of year!