Helenium ‘Sahin’s Early Flowerer’ was discovered as a seedling growing in the Sahin trial grounds in Zeeland, Holland. It was selected in 1996 for its long flowering season.
For me it starts flowering around mid July and has a main flowering period of four to six weeks, then produces a trickle of blooms into the autumn. It is about 90cm tall, entirely self supporting and compared to several other Helenium varieties I have grown, is slug resistant. It tolerates but doesn’t like, drought.
The colour is yellow overlaid with reddish orange, the base and tips of the petals remaining yellow. The prominenet central cone is dark brown, made paler as the florets open from the edge in towards the middle.
All that said, I still haven’t got to the main reason why I have such high regard for it as a garden plant, which is that it is by far and away the most popular plant in my garden with bees, butterflies, hoverflies and oddly, crickets. On a sunny day, there will be more many insects on my quite large clump as in the rest of the garden put together.
Both the individual flowers and the whole clump demand a photographers attention and having just purchased a new telephoto lens, I have been snapping away.
garden ruminations 
“Discovered as a seedling” makes me wonder how many new plants fail to be discovered because people simply dig up strange seedlings as “weeds”. I used to have a few clumps of it here. I can only assume that Welsh slugs are tougher than Cornish ones. 🙂
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I have a row of Dahlia seedlings on my allotment, to see if any are good, and numerous Camellia seedlings, most of which will be good but few or none significantly different from existing forms. Maybe I should rent a field as a trial ground….
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This is on my “I WANT” list. I have your basic autumnale that I grew from seed,got bags of it after dividing a clump. But want this one and moorheims beauty too. Such good garden plants.
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Moorheim’s Beauty I just couldn’t keep the slugs off for it to grow. Chipperfield Orange is going very well, tall and not flowering yet. I also have Monique, which is very showy, also not flowering yet. Feursiegel is also going OK now, after a shaky start, again, no flower yet.
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