Winning Flower Seeds, Vegetable Seeds for 2013

Enlarge Image Image Gallery All-America Selection's Canna South Pacific Scarlet is one of the 2013 flowering plant award winners. courtesy All-America Selections

DOWNERS GROVE, Ill. – The All-America Selections (AAS) Board of Directors approved two flowering plants from previous trials as the first two winners for the 2013 gardening season. The second batch of winners, in a sign of the continuing trend in the home garden market, features three plants from the vegetable category, even though two are classified botanically as fruits, and one is debatably a fruit. A fourth winner, a geranium, is always a garden-favorite.

Each of these winners was trialed next to two or three other similar varieties that are currently on the market. The AAS judges grew each entry, and then did a side-by-side analysis of growth habit, taste, disease resistance and additional characteristics to determine if these were truly better than those already available to home gardeners. Only those entries with superior garden performance (and taste, for edibles) are granted the honor of an AAS Award.

Canna 'South Pacific Scarlet' F1, AAS Flower Award Winner 

Allow ‘South Pacific’ to add a touch of the tropics to your garden with showy, 4-inch flowers that bloom all summer long in a delicious shade of scarlet.

AAS judges raved about this first F1 hybrid canna from seed because it is such a floriferous bloomer. ‘South Pacific’ grows up 4 to 5 feet tall and 12 to 18 inches wide, providing a great grouping of specimen plants or a back-of-the-border focal point. The colorful blooms are produced on a flower spike held above the large leafed statuesque plants.

Home gardeners will love the robust nature and the many flower-laden branches it produces. ‘South Pacific’ boasts six to seven stems per plant and delivers larger flowers than other seed cannas. The scarlet flowers appear early, bloom consistently all summer and withstand a light frost better than comparisons. As with other cannas, ‘South Pacific’ tolerates wet conditions so it can be used as a pond border or in other similar growing conditions. It requires full sun, spacing of 18 to 24 inches, and will take 11 to 12 weeks from seed to flower.

Canna is a perennial but can be treated as an annual by northern gardeners. Rhizomes can be dug before first frost and stored properly for the next season. Good in Zones 7 to 10. Bred by Takii & Co. Ltd.

Echinacea ‘Cheyenne Spirit,’ AAS Flower Award Winner 

This stunning first-year flowering echinacea captures the spirit of the North American plains by producing a delightful mix of flower colors from rich purple, pink, red and orange tones to lighter yellows, creams and white. This wide range of flower colors on well branched, durable plants is sure to please the color preferences of any gardener. As an added bonus, ‘Cheyenne Spirit’ does not require a lot of water and offers a wide-range of uses from the perennial border, in a mass landscape planting, in a butterfly garden or as a cut flower.