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| Photo Credit: Mississippi State University |
| Orange Profusion Zinnias help liven up combination plantings. |
My new favorite plant does not act alone. In fact, it comes in a series of great zinnias with amazing colors of orange, white and red. It’s Profusion Zinnia, and I love it.
But it’s not just the brilliant colors that caught my eye when I first spotted these fantastic flowers this past summer; it’s the downright toughness of the little plants. For those who don’t keep up with The Weather Channel, we had a pretty rough Summer 2006 in the Southwest – Texas included. In my north Texas area, we’ve been more than 30 inches short on rainfall over the past 18 months, and to make matters worse, we suffered a summer with scorching heat – with more than 40 days of 100-degree temperatures. Even though we had rain come that fall, most of our area was still under severe watering restrictions in October. So you can image what our flower beds looked like. We began the summer with our usual marigolds, bachelor’s buttons, begonias, petunias and impatiens – annuals that usually last until our first frost, sometime in November. Even our usually dependable lantanas were showing the effects of the long, hot summer. By the first of August, these plants all looked like they had caught on fire. (Actually, in a way they had.) Then along came these small, brightly colored zinnias in orange, white and cherry red. Landscape professionals and homeowners began replacing washed-out, burned-up begonias with this amazing annual flower that withstood the harshest summer we’ve had in many years. But these plants aren’t just great for summer – they’re great for fall, too! If you plant Profusion Zinnias in autumn, you should have color in your fall garden that lasts until frost.
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