Challenges from his students through the years provided Dr. Mike Arnold a golden lesson. Dakota Gold, to be exact. The new flowering annual developed by the Texas A&M University horticulture professor and a couple of students will be available for home gardens this spring.

For years, Arnold stood before his spring semester Plant Materials class and cautioned about the suitability of northern state's bedding plants for southern gardens.

"I would tell them that suppliers call those plants ‘heat tolerant' by midwestern standards," Arnold recalled. "Here those plants begin to ‘turn up their toes' and die by June. So I'd tell the students that we should use more native Texas plants to develop commercial ornamentals."

Invariably after Arnold made such a statement, a student would ask, "So, why don't you do that?" The message soaked in.

"After I heard that a few times, I thought, ‘I might ought to,'" Arnold said, smiling.

The first choice was the example he had long suggested in lectures – helenium, a low-growing weed that produces small, bright yellow, daisy-like blooms. In 1998, Arnold and a couple of students began gathering seed from roadsides, primarily in Brazos County, he said.

Because of frequent mowing, these plants had adapted to producing abundant, quick-blooming flowers on short stalks as a way of reproducing before mower blades returned. That gave them potential as a commercial variety because many gardeners want plants with lots of blooms and a low-spreading growth form, the horticulturist said.
In the wild, Arnold noted, helenium has a rangy growth habit. In fact, Helenium amarum is otherwise known as bitter sneezeweed, a member of the sunflower family. Cows that eat it and bees that collect its pollen produce distasteful milk and honey, according to "Texas Range Plants," by Dr. Stephan Hatch and Jennifer Pluhar, Texas A&M rangeland professor and range consultant, respectively. It also can cause digestive problems in livestock.
Arnold said those features are not a concern for the commercialized helenium grown and easily contained annually in flower beds.

"Because it is a native species in the southern United States, it does not pose a risk in our region of becoming an invasive exotic species," Arnold added.

Developing a suitable annual for home gardens required years of growing seeds in a field and plucking out those plants with undesirable traits.

"We did that for about five years. We'd grow hundreds of plants every year but select only five or 10 and throw everything else away," Arnold said. "We finally got to the point where we were producing a uniform plant."

That's when Arnold turned the project over to a breeding company -- PanAm Ball -- after their representatives saw the plant at a Texas A&M horticulture field day and bought the rights to develop the plant, through the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station with whom Arnold has a joint position.

Plant breeding companies have the ability to breed plants under more controlled conditions with hand-pollination, for example, Arnold said.

The result is a 6-inch tall plant that produces a flattened mound with numerous large flowers. And best of all, Arnold noted, is that this native plant requires little water, fertilizer or insect control. A 4-inch transplant should grow to be a 12- to 18-inch wide mature plant, he said, with little watering.

"They will bloom and remain attractive, once established from April plantings, through the first of October," Arnold said.

Writer: Kathleen Phillips