Pentas can take the heat and keep on blooming.(Home & Garden)(Midwest gardening)

Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL), May, 2007

Byline: Jan Riggenbach I first got to know pentas one particularly brutal summer. Some of my annuals in containers had "cooked" in the blazing sun by August, so I went to a local garden center in search of replacements. Pentas, also known as Egyptian star-flowers, caught my eye. They were the only plants in the place that still looked springtime fresh, with clusters of star-shaped flowers and handsome dark-green foliage.

The pentas I took home that day staged a continuous show that lasted until frost. Butterflies and hummingbirds, which paid constant visits to the flowers, doubled my admiration for these durable plants. In recent years plant breeders have been at work, making pentas even more desirable. Compact, early-blooming varieties like the Graffiti...