Petunia Bees Knees

The Ball Summer Showcase has become one of the key trade events in the horticultural diary, attended by over 2,000 nurseries, retailers, landscapers and gardening media.

This year visitors were provided with an extensive presentation of Annuals and Perennials as retail bench and merchandised trolley displays, with the plants grown in a range of pots sizes to help growers and retailers see the real market potential of each variety.

Along with basket, container and flower bed displays, one of the popular areas on display is the product managers trialling area of over 2,000 experimental Annual and Perennial varieties. This provides visitors full transparency on ‘What’s cooking in the kitchen’, a great insight to the continuous stream of future new plant varieties.

In time-honoured tradition, visitors took the opportunity to vote for their favourite Annual and Perennial varieties from any of the trials and plant displays using a ‘Blue Flag’.

We counted these flags every day for over 4 weeks and are delighted to share these results with you. Over 1,300 votes were cast, providing a most useful measure of what look to be your ‘stand-out’ Annual and Perennial plants for 2025:

Click below for a sneak peak of some of the New Varieties for 2025 which were displayed at this year's Summer Showcase!

Over 60 years of Plant Trials

Ball Colegrave has been conducting plant variety trials and customer open days from their Trial Grounds in West Adderbury for over 62 years.

Today’s Trial Grounds not only presents the companies wide assortment of catalogue varieties in a rich display of settings and retail ideas, but also comprehensively evaluates thousands of new future lines before introduction. This ensures that when a product is introduced in the Ball Colegrave catalogues, our staff and visitors have seen it and know it really does perform well under UK growing conditions!

For more information please contact Customer Services on 01295 811 833

For directions to Ball Colegrave, please click on this link.