Add Diversity to Your Mums
Though many people approach mums as a relentless crop of ho-hum flowers, you can stand out in the crowd with a quality display of interesting mums. The modern decor mum dominates autumn because of its incredible genetic diversity, and this characteristic flaunts itself in the collection of mums we offer.
To start, there are two major types of mum flowers. One is an open-face, daisy-style bloom that is available in both singles and doubles. There are different types of daisy-style blooms, as shown with the sample flowers above, but they all have a clearly seen eye.
Examples of daisy-style blooms are:
‘Starstruck Pink’
‘Dazzling Stacey’
‘Echo Bronze’
‘Sunny Camille’
Daisy-style mums are valued for their clean, flat presentation of color. They hold their blooms level with each other. With the solids, like ‘Starstruck Pink’ and ‘Sunny Camille’, they deliver a mass of clean color. With bi-colors like ‘Dazzling Stacey’, or complex shades like ‘Echo Bronze’, the focus is still on that clean presentation of color.
The second style of mum is the decorative style, where the petals of the flower crowd all the way up and hide the eye of the bloom.
En masse, decoratives present fuzzy color, not flat like the daisy-style mums. Instead they are end-up, with colors and small interior shadows all over the plant. Furthermore, notice that the decoratives do not hold their flowers level with each other. Their color has depth—some blooms are held higher; some blooms are held lower. The color could be described as textured, dimensional or just richer because of the layering effect.
Examples of decorative mums are:
‘Aubrey Orange’
‘Megan’
‘Miranda’
‘Rhapsody’ (dark red) & ‘Victoria’ (light pink)
And then there is something a little different—‘Yolanda’.
‘Yolanda’
It falls somewhere in between the two mum styles. The outer petals fall away, like a daisy-style mum, but the inner petals remain close to the eye, like a decorative style. Flowers wind up with a small central button cone, which is an unusual look for a mum.
