The chicagoland Grows© plant introduction program - A model for success

Botanic gardens and arboreta, as repositories of living plant collections, are increasingly initiating plant introduction programs as vehicles for marketing unusual and valuable ornamental plants from their collections. One such program is the Chicagoland Grows Plant Introduction Program, a corporate partnership between Chicago Botanic Garden, The Morton Arboretum, and the Ornamental Grower's Association of Northern Illinois (OGA), a network of nurseries located in northeastern Illinois. Established in 1986, Chicagoland Grows works collectively with industry professionals throughout North America (95 nurseries and six tissue culture labs in 23 states are licensed to propagate and grow the program's plants) to select, evaluate, produce and market new and recommended plant cultivars with proven performance under Northern growing conditions. From the collections of the partners and other sources ten trees and shrubs have been released, with eighteen more woody plants undergoing initial nursery production, and eighteen more plants (woody and herbaceous) being propagated for evaluation. New plants are initially evaluated by a group of gardens, universities, and municipalities, followed by production and field evaluations by cooperating nurseries. Once a plant's production figures reach a predetermined quota, it is released for promotion and open market sales. Plants are promoted through Plant Release Bulletins, a color flyer distributed to nurseries, landscape architects, and horticulture researchers; presentations at trade shows and professional plant society meetings; articles in trade magazines; booth exhibitions at trade shows; through the catalogs of the cooperating nurseries; and on the web sites of the corporate partners. The program structure includes an executive committee; an R & D committee that recommends new plants; and a production scheduling committee that assesses propagation protocols, tracks inventories, assigns cultivar and trade names, and release dates.