I’ve been out to wholesale plant firm Ball Colegrave for a preview of some of the new bedding for 2025 and to find out more about the business that links breeders with plant retailers.
Bedding plants are known for their colour but nothing had prepared me for the display at Ball Colegrave. Borders, containers and hanging baskets planted with summer annuals and perennials dazzled with a paintbox array of colours.
I was there for the Summer Showcase where the company shows off its new varieties to nurseries, garden centres, council garden teams and landscapers. It’s a shop window and was packed with temptation.
Colegrave Seeds was started in 1962 by the late David Colegrave in his garage in the Oxfordshire village of West Adderbury where the firm, which merged with Ball Horticultural Company in 2001, still has its headquarters, just a stone’s throw from the original garage. David Colegrave was the first to introduce F1 varieties to the UK.
Today, the firm’s four-acre site is not only a display area but also where new varieties are trialled to make sure they suit the British climate.
“It’s been pretty challenging this season,” Marketing Manager Stuart Lowen told us. “What you see is how the plants perform in all conditions, warts and all.”
This trialling is a crucial part of the business, which deals with plant breeders from all over the world. New varieties are tested not only for their garden performance but also for how well they can be produced on a commercial scale. Will seeds come true to type, are plants easy to propagate from cutting or from tissue culture, these are all vital if the plant is going to be suitable for the wholesale market.
“We’re asking ‘Can we produce it? What are the challenges?” said Stuart.
It’s a long process – a new seed variety can take up to seven years to reach market whereas developing a cutting-raised variety can be quite a bit quicker. The failure rate for introduction is high. Stuart told me that only between one and two percent of new varieties Ball Colegrave look at will end up being available for gardeners to buy.
Aside from the weather with increasing extremes of temperature and erratic rainfall, the other challenge facing the industry is the move to peat-free. While Ball Colegrave don’t yet produce their range of plug plants and 9cm ‘liners’ in peat-free compost, they have been carrying out rigorous trials to understand how to alter growing techniques to ensure success. The majority of their shrub stock – a more recent introduction – is already grown peat-free.
The firm sells to garden centres and nurseries who grow on plug plants, mail order firms, landscapers and gardening teams, and around 2,000 visitors attend the three-week Summer Showcase.
As well as displays and a presentation on the new summer bedding for 2025, there was the chance to see beds where the horticultural team are testing everything from perennials to shrubs and roses along with more permanent borders planted with perennials.
There were also many displays of the summer bedding varieties that were being trialled.
As part of the Summer Showcase, Ball Colegrave put together retail ideas, grouping plants on a theme, such as shade-lovers or foliage plants. I particularly liked the nautical idea of blues, whites and yellow – a splash of sun, perhaps?
Some of the ideas were just a colourfest, such as this wall display of bedding in shades of pink, yellow, orange and red.
The new varieties we were shown had something for every gardening style. There were petunias, including ‘Fanfare™ Heartbreaker’ so named because of the heart-shaped red petals. I liked Calibrachoa ‘Can-Can® Double Loopy Pink’ as much for its name as its vibrant pink and yellow blooms. There are also new colour mixes in the Impatiens Beacon® range, which has high resistance to the downy mildew that took this popular summer plant off the market for a while.
I was rather taken with Petunia ‘Amazonas Plum Cockatoo’, which I used for this week’s Cheering Up Mondays flower (you can see it here), but P. ‘Sweet Sunshine® Blue Sky’ is also likely to be a winner. A variation on the already available ‘Night Sky®’, it has similar colour but double flowers.
Antirrhinums have come back into fashion over the past few years and this variety with lovely dark foliage is yet another reason to grow them.
I love sunshine colours and orange so these two new introductions were always going to appeal. I’m growing lantana this season and this variety is one to look out for next year.
Bidens has long used as a filler with other plants and Stuart is hoping this new variety will see it used as a summer star in its own right. Certainly, the container he showed us filled with three plants was impressive.
I know several head gardeners who are moving away from summer bedding in favour of perennial plants that take less maintenance but as a way to brighten an often disappointing British summer, I think there will always be a place for annuals.
Enjoyed this? You can read about more of my nursery visits here.
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