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Photo Credit: National Garden Bureau

‘Midnight Sun’ is one of the new striking pansies for 2008 that would make a good addition to fall SoCal gardens.

Every year, seed companies and plant breeders come up with numerous new varieties, and each year we garden writers see them in growers’ trials – or we grow them ourselves from early seed samples they send us. And as we go along, we learn that all that glitters is not gold.

Sometimes the advertising blurbs and descriptions written by clever marketing people miss the mark. Other times a highly touted new variety looks good in one climate but not in another. And still, many of the new varieties offered don’t work in the summer growing season in Southern California, so we have to wait until fall arrives to see how they truly fare. Nevertheless, each year brings some new varieties that are slightly better than an old one, as well as a few that show promise for our warm-winter climates.

Now that fall has arrived, it’s the perfect time to trial some of the 2008 winners in your own SoCal garden. While it may be too late to start them from seed (and you might not even find the seed offered anyway), you should have some luck finding many of them as started plants in the better garden centers and home improvement stores.

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Photo Credit: National Garden Bureau

Matrix™ Morpheus may sound like a funny name, but it’s a beautiful new pansy for fall.

As usual, there are new pansies and violas that looked good to me. The seed company Syngenta put together three pansies in its Designer Collection™. One exceptional member of this group is Viola x wittrockiana ‘Midnight Sun’, which has smoky black petals and a yellow face with dark whiskers.

This year Ball Horticultural Co. is offering the V. x wittrockiana Matrix™ Morpheus series. There are 16 color variants and six color mixtures in this collection, and the trials I saw were excellent. At 8-10 inches, the plants are a bit taller than we often like, but ultra-dwarf varieties do get old.