Koko Puff

Glenn Gitts introduced Koko Puff in 1994, and for years it was a quiet society-show flower before the antique color wave found it. Floret now lists it as a must grow if you love unique additions, and the market agrees with its wallet, with sellouts at La Finca, Tiny Little Dots, Ferris Farm, and Rolling Hills. Smoky mauve is among the hardest colors to source in any cut flower, let alone in a shippable pompon, and thirty years on this remains the reference variety for it. Old introduction, new scarcity. The internet does that to good flowers.

Koko Puff is a true pompon, ADS classification 6208, with perfect little drums under 2 inches on plants that reached 3.5 feet in Idlewild Blooms' field. Pompon rules apply: net the row because the plants get taller than the dainty blooms suggest, cut constantly, and take stems a touch tight. The smoky color is weather-responsive, leaning rose in heat and lavender in cool, overcast spells, so expect your September buckets to look different from July's. It dries and holds exceptionally well in the vase like most pompons. For design work there is not a clean substitute at this scale; dusty mauve pompons are essentially a category of one in most catalogs.