Let me add another comment from within the industry. There are all sorts of reasons Proven Winners may decide to discontinue marketing a specific cultivar - it may be difficult or slow to propagate, it may have prohibitively restrictive royalties associated with it due to patenting or trademarks, it may not sell as well as they had hoped or they have elected to replace it with a different, typically newly released, but similar plant. It does not necessarily mean that there is anything inferior or inherently "defective" about the discontinued cultivar. Proven Winners is a marketing label, nothing more. They are profit driven and if their costs are too high for the return or the consumers are not buying, then they change their selection. It's as simple as that. They do not have a corner on the enormous perennial plant market nor are they arbitors of what is or isn't a gardenworthy plant. As a manager and a buyer for a large retail nursery and a nursery professional for many years, I can state with impunity that all of the plants included on the linked listing continue to be widely grown and sold by all manner of wholesalers and with good reason - most are great plants, some award winners. I buy, carry and sell out of pretty much every plant on that list and not once have I ever brought one in that has a Proven Winners tag or proprietary container associated with it. I choose to support my local wholesale growers and not to line PW's already very fat pockets. Unfortunately, many new releases are hyped up with heavy marketing campaigns before they have been fully tested for performance, hardiness and durability. Coreopsis 'Limerock Ruby' is one that was initially touted as a perennial coreopsis but was later determined that its parentage made it act more like an annual - it continues to be sold today as an annual coreopsis. Ditto with the 'Art's Pride/Orange Meadowbrite' echinaceas - the breeding program just hadn't been able to nail down color stability before their widespread release, which the Itsaul breeding program has very successfully accomplished. What it boils down to is consumer awareness and the ability to select plants for their reliability and performance, not because some marketeer somewhere has decided that this newest selection should be hyped to maximize their profits or that this old selection should be "phased out" because it is no longer covered by patent restrictions and is fair game to any wholesale grower. YOU as the consumer are the deciding factor as to what gets carried by and is available in your local garden centers and your favorite mail order or online nursery, not some faceless organization with a self-serving title. If you like the plant, buy it and grow it, but don't base your choices based on some arbitrary listing one marketing company has determined for purely subjective and mostly economic reasons will govern the selections they offer. There are zillions more fish in the sea than Proven Winners.

We were on our way to the farms in Henry County. I looked it up, and Henry is just NE of Mercer and share a little bit of the boundary. The farms, one is just two miles north of Bishop Hill on a hard road, and the other one is maybe 1/2 mile away on a road that used to be dirt but now, I don't know what, they used to oil it but think it might be blacktop. Well, now I see a couple, Aledo and Viola, Keithsburg are familiar but don't remember being through Kburg. My ex sister-in-law lives in New Boston. We'd take different routes, usually the road through Cambridge and sometimes the road out of Coal Valley, past Orion and then a long straight stretch with a dip where you could see about 2 miles and on into Alpha. In that stretch and off to the right were some woods, and I suppose we were trespassing, but that is where we found the JIP's, trillium and mayapples. I never found any morel mushrooms but wild grapes and made jam. We would stop in Alpha and eat at an old diner which used to be a railway car, think it is no longer there. But I think we went an unfamiliar route that day and could have been in Mercer County, but I thought the sign said Edwards Creek which could run into Edwards River. Now it seems that it WAS Edwards River. I doubt I could find the bridge crossing the river again unless I asked my second cousin in Galva; he might know. It's hard to catch asparagus when it is still a short stalk. Sometimes there will still be some at the base of that, tall, airy foliage. One time I walked or rode my bicycle from my grandmother's in Galva out in the country a short ways and found some, would have had to break it off as I doubt I had my pocket knife with me, and my grandmother cooked it. I'd also grind corn into meal in the barn, shelled it off the cob with a corn sheller, and put it through a large grinder you worked back and forth by hand, have a photo of it, will see if I can find it. It's up in the haymow at the barn on one farm. The barn on the other farm burned down as did my grandma's house after she died. My granddaughter won $50 for her photo of the corncrib which was on a local credit union calendar one year. If you can find some seeds, that would be fun. I think the usual cultivated variety is Martha Washington. You saw my place, and I have already sowed black raspberries and currants. Maybe we will have to move to one of the farms. Seriously. And I finally found Edwards River, and it winds around just near the farms in Henry County. I contributed these maps from my old atlas years ago to USGENWEB. The link to the Mercer County map follows, and the link to the Henry County Map is at the useful link. On the Henry County Map, zoom it up, scroll down almost to the bottom, and you will see the river in Lynn Twp and Andover Twp. Then there is a fork, and it winds SE down near Bishop Hill in Weller Twp. The corncrib, my father and grandfather built during the depression on their farm (my grandfather bought the other one). They are close but different twps, and I can never remember which is in which. I don't know how I get off on these tangents, so many memories when I was a little girl. That is great about your mother being your mentor. This post to assemble the links and photos, took me here, there and everywhere, so now I have completely lost my train of thought and what else I saw in your post. Here is the link to Mercer County. It's easy to miss in the mess I made of this. The link to the Henry County map is just under the corncrib photo. Here is a link that might be useful:

There is a selection of red Salvia splendens called Yvonne's Salvia. It grows about 3 ft. high or taller. I got some seeds from the seed exchange years ago. I wasn't dilligent at saving the seeds, so I don't have them anymore. Some guy just kept collecting seeds from his tallest red Salvias, and after several years they became giants.

I'm sure that they will come. I haven't seen any in my yard as well. I had a few last year, but this year our weather has been very rainy and cool. I hope that they are just being lazy and are waiting for July! I'm sure that you well get some. Do you put out any feeders? I had one last year and they loved it. After that, they started to visit my salvia, black and blue. They LOVED that plant. oh, and my red oleander, which i was able to overwinter.