A brand new native plant has been given top awards on both sides of the Atlantic. Gaillardia x grandiflora ‘Mesa Yellow’ has won the top award for new annuals in the USA – it’s been chosen as one of four All-America Selections for 2010 – and it’s also won the European equivalent, a Gold Medal for 2010 from Fleuroselect. Both awards are the result of assessment in trials in a wide range of climates and it’s rare for a plant to win both awards so it really must be good.

But does anything strike you as odd about that statement? A “brand new native plant”? If it’s a native plant, hasn’t it been around for thousands of years – by definition?

The citation from Fleuroselect reads: “Like the flat-topped mountains (mesas) after which it is named, this first commercial quality, yellow gaillardia from seed is native of the southern United States.”

In fact ‘Mesa Yellow’ is not native to anywhere, it’s a man-made hybrid. It’s a sophisticated tetraploid F1 hybrid (with twice the normal number of chromosomes) between the perennial Gaillardia aristata and the annual G. pulchella which was created in the high-tech plant breeding greenhouses of the Pan-American Seed Company. Nothing wrong with that - but does it sound like a native plant to you?

It’s true, the original version of this hybrid, G. x grandiflora, has occasionally escaped from gardens into natural habitats over the years and, according to the USDA website, is found in the wild in Indiana, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania. But that doesn’t make it native, and certainly not “native of the southern United States”.

‘Mesa Yellow’ is early flowering, prolific and colorful – it sounds like a fine plant for gardens, containers and landscape use. But it’s a highly sophisticated man-made hybrid so let’s not deceive gardeners by pretending it’s an American native. It’s no more native than the hybrid petunias and impatiens bred by the same company.