Dahlightful™ Dahlias

Dahlightful™ ‘Lively Lavender’

Brilliant dahlias are longtime favorites for brightening up sunny landscape beds. This spring we’re widening the playing field with the Dahlightful™ series—it’s been bred specifically for containers. These short, bushy plants have strong stems and lots of double blooms—we hope you like the look as much as we do.

Courtesy of Astronaut Scott Kelly

Zinnia is one of our favorite plants to turn to for bright, bold splashes of color, and now it’s boldly gone where no flowering plant has gone before: it’s the first flower to be grown in space. Astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted this photo of the pretty orange zinnia from the International Space Station last week to announce the exciting news. You can read more about it here: 

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/astronauts-grow-first-flower-in-space/

In honor of this far out flower we’ve decided it’s a fitting time to tell you about our new Zahara zinnia selections for spring—they exhibit some impressive flower power themselves. Large blooms cover these full, bushy plants all summer long, plus we rely on Zaharas for their dependable tolerance to drought, heat, and disease as the temperatures climb during the height of the season.

Here are the vibrant new cultivars—all are available in the 1801 flat and the 6-inch pot:

‘Starlight Rose’—pure white flowers, each with a magenta-rose halo in the center

‘Raspberry’—raspberry red flowers with golden centers

‘Fire’—orange flowers with golden centers

‘Double Yellow’—bright yellow fully double flowers

‘Double Strawberry’—bright pink fully double flowers

Zahara series

‘Freefall Marina‘

We have a pretty new purple pansy for early spring; it hasn’t been to space, but ‘Freefall Marina’ looks a little like falling stars spilling out of the 10-inch hanging basket.

Well, we tried.

As you can see, it does come through with some far out flower power: this is a vigorous trailing pansy. ‘Freefall Marina’ blooms early and long; mounding plants are literally covered in 2-inch blooms early in spring and late into winter. They spread about 12–15 inches. 

This is a great plant to add to your design tool box: it more than delivers in the color department and is extremely hardy, standing up to all but the harshest weather conditions. We like the falling-to-earth look, but ‘Freefall Marina’ brightens all kinds of containers and landscape beds as well.