Flower Trials 2022: What's Looking Great Now

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- So we're standing here in the combination area.

And for combinations, what we do at Penn State is we put two standing pots and one hanging basket of the same entry.

They're rated independently.

But here we have a really nice one from Selecta.

This is a Trixi called Enchanted Evening and it's really got a lot of flower power to it.

We got this lovely white Calibrachoa in here, and this beautiful Petunia, and a Verbena, and they're all playing together fairly well.

One of the things we see about combinations is if you have several different species, one often overwhelms the other two by the end of the season.

Here we are in July, or August, excuse me, the 16th of August, precisely.

And so what's looking good now is very, very important.

- All right.

So following up with the year of 2023 introductions is the year of Celosia, and we are really good at growing Celosia here in Landisville.

We have 17 cultivars from a variety of breeders here.

And honestly, if you just look down the line, so much great color, so much great habit.

Perennial winners in my book, and they always do well throughout the season.

- Here's a series of geraniums from Cerny Seed that are worth talking about, and these plants are pollen sterile, so as long as they're far away enough from another geranium they will not set seed, and as such they're self cleaning.

So they do a really nice job of removing their own spent flowers during the growing season.

Here's salmon, here's scarlet, violet, and white, and they're all doing quite nicely and look very good.

From Kientzler North America have come this series called the Pockets, and these calibrachoas are really, really compact.

Their habit is smaller than almost everything else in the program.

This is Pocket 'Blue', it's not really blue it's purple, but it's a beautiful plant, and it has a good amount of flowering going on with it.

And here is Pocket 'Dark Pink' which is probably my favorite in the whole series.

Again, a very compact habit and a lot of bloom, very strong color.

So something worthwhile for the garden.

There's some terrific petunias out here in the field this year, we have almost a hundred entries and some of them are doing really really well here in mid-August, which is an important criteria for judging them.

Here's one, for example, this is petunia SURFINIA 'Heavenly Cabernet' from Suntory.

It's got a really striking color, rich, dark and it's also got a very compact and uniform habit.

Over here is the infamous 'Bee's Knees' from Ball which has been a star performer in several years of trials.

This year again, looking really good at this point.

And here from proven winners, we have the Superbell series.

This is the Coral Sun, which is a nice, intense color.

It reads well from a distance.

And then over here, we have Prism Pink Lemonade which gives you this wonderful two-tone effect on the plant, the flowers come out, and then they fade to a darker pink as they mature.

So really a nice, nice plant.

- All right.

So we have two really great introductions from proven winners, the Supertunia Mini Vista.

This is the Hot Pink, and then this is the Midnight.

And honestly, there's so much flower power.

This is a great mounding habit.

If you struggle with calibrachoa, it is a good option to think about one of these smaller petunia varieties, such as this one.

But like I said, just really great flower power really awesome mounding habit on both.

And on that same note, if you are looking for a small petunia type flower and you don't wanna grow calibrachoa, these Itsy's from Syngenta, they did well last year.

And I really do love them here.

Just such a pretty small delicate flower.

And this pink one, it's almost a magenta is just striking.

- A couple of real stars in the petunia department are these two from Ball FloraPlant.

There's SureShot White, a nice compact habit.

And this one is the ColorRush White, ColorRush white, which is also a very good habit but a little bit larger than the SureShots.

And these two have been blooming very well all year.

You see the blue flag in here that indicates this plant received a superior rating on the first rating, which was the first week of July.

- Another one I wanna talk about here is this Combos Confetti Garden 'Time for Summer' from Dummen Orange.

You know, it's just such a great summer color.

I think it would look fabulous on your patios or next to your pool or on your front porch.

Just a really good play of pinks and oranges and yellows and purples and it's just stunning.

So when we were driving around, looking at things to decide what we were gonna highlight today, this combo here, it's a SuperCal Premium from Sakata.

It's called Orange Popper, and honestly it does pop.

We were, you know, probably 30 feet away and I was like, oh, we gotta go check out that orange one.

And then next to it is the same line but it's called Bordeaux Ice.

It has this great Bordeaux colored petunia some Lantana, Angelonia and a wonderful Coleus.

Both of these are fabulous and looking really great here in August.

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