Group 3 - Potomac, Opus, Madame Butterfly Group 2 - Animation, Costa, Overture, Maryland, They were selected for controlled greenhouse production, but do very well in the field with a little planning. Like terrier dogs bred for vermin extermination or draft horses bred for plowing a field or Polish chickens bred for their fluffy feathers, snapdragons have been bred to flower in four different groups in the season based off of light intensity, temperature, and day length. Snapdragons are one of those weird flowers that are incredibly predictable. Having a row of snapdragons is easily one of the best investments that a flower grower can make! They are also relatively easy to grow once you have a couple key concepts down. But it’s also important to have crops that will be reliably productive for when you need to fill bouquets or just need flowers available. I’m also pretty sure that if we hadn’t moved, we would have a whole row of overwintered snapdragons ready to go this spring as well.Īs a grower, it’s very important to have crops that are pretty and unique and top sellers. And cut them again all the way into November. When we grew them last year, I was very excited to cut them at first. What I didn’t know however, was just how productive snapdragons are. In addition, I was seeing more of the unusual varieties - the open faced Chantilly, the ruffly azalea-flowering Madame Butterflies, the short explosion of petals with the Twinny series, the soft bicolored appleblossom coloration. A row of snapdragons standing upright at attention is something to behold.

We don’t have too many of those vertical spires available to us - digitalis, veronicas, verbascums, eremerus are the only ones aside from snapdragons I can think of. That was, until I saw some photos of snapdragons in farmers fields. Boring, standard, and overused, there was nothing that I loved about snapdragons. In addition, snapdragons were endemic in all of the very standard Teleflora designs, especially in the “Hospital Dolly Yellow” as Sarah Raven describes it. They were kind of “meh.” I thought of them as mostly bedraggled bedding plants that never really looked great at any point, although I was fascinated by the small snapdragon that managed to struggle and overwinter three years in a row. Snapdragons aren’t necessarily one of the flowers that I first fell in love with as a grower.

Rocket snapdragons