This isn’t your mother’s petunia

This season, heat up the landscape as never before with the addition of petunia hybrids. These updated petunias can add vibrant color to your garden space and are a low-maintenance plant. These fantastic beauties from Proven Winners include aptly-named hot pink Supertunia Vista Bubblegum and saturated deeper pink Supertunia Vista Fuchsia. They are a far cry from the petunias of yesteryear in your mother's and grandmother's gardens, but still retain the same charm and fragrance of their forebears.

Gardening expert P. Allen Smith knows plants and has selected the Supertunia Vista series as one of the Hot 21 Plants for 2007. They have a mature height of 24 inches and are perfect landscape fillers that bloom all season.

Over the years petunia breeding has been intense. Hybridizers were striving to produce plants that branched well and bloomed freely over the whole plant, not just on the ends of the stems. Other desirable attributes included improving disease resistance and expanding the color range and bloom time. This concentrated work eventually produced, among others, the Supertunia line, that has been so successful.

Today, Proven Winners offers large- and miniflowered petunia hybrids in a range of brilliant colors from white and pale lemon to many shades of pink and red, lavender and purple, as well as bicolors and doubles. Many of the flowers are etched in intricate patterns with a darker color. Long blooming, fragrant, sterile, and self-cleaning, Supertunias are hard to beat for overall performance in container combinations, especially in hanging baskets, window boxes, mixed and monochromatic pots, urns and other containers. But they are not always ideal for in-ground planting on a large scale.

Now, along comes the Supertunia Vista landscape series, bred especially to thrive in and decorate flowerbeds and borders in the garden. This series of hybrid petunias are great as tall groundcover, perhaps as an edging to set off a shrub or flower border, or to create an eye-catching swath of color around the pool, patio, or a fountain or large piece of sculpture. They are also wonderful for massing an otherwise difficult sunny bank. The vigorous and flashy Supertunia Vista series starts blooming earlier than other petunias as soon as the ground warms, and continues through the heat of summer right up to the first frosts of fall.

* From a small nursery pot, each plant fills in rapidly, mounding up to knee-height, about 2 feet tall with an eventual spread of 2 feet or more (a 4-foot spread has been reported under ideal conditions).

* To keep the 2-inch-wide flowers coming and coming, plant Supertunia Vista petunias in full sun (or light shade for part of the day), keep them well watered but not soggy, and feed them regularly with liquid fertilizer. These fragrant, easy-to-grow lovelies require no pinching or deadheading, resist disease, and bloom nonstop -- what more could you want?

* You have no space to plant in the ground, you say? Proven Winners' Supertunia Vista Bubblegum and Supertunia Vista Fuchsia also adapt well to hanging basket and window box culture. Let them tumble from their containers and create sheets of brilliant color to decorate your outdoor living space all season long.

To find a Proven Winner retailer near you, visit www.provenwinners.com.

Courtesy Family Features