Instant winter color, new dwarf cherry trees, All-America flowers - Sunset's Garden Guide

Sunset, Jan, 1995 by Jim McCausland, Lauren Bonar Swezey

During the dark days of winter, color-hungry gardeners can use quite a few flowering plants to brighten up the windowsill--or the garden--in mild parts of the West. Some colorful options available at nurseries and florists are pictured clockwise from top left: red and pink cyclamen, yellow and rose Primula polyantha, pink P. obconica, and Johnny-jump-up. Transplanted from sixpacks and 4-inch pots into decorative containers, these plants can keep on flowering for weeks.

If you grow them indoors, put plants in a spot that gets plenty of light to encourage continued bloom. If you try them outdoors, be prepared to bring them in when frost is predicted. Wear gloves when you plant P. obconica, whose hairy stems irritate some people's skin.

Sweet cherry trees for small gardens

Sweet cherries normally grow on large trees, and for cherry-loving gardeners that's often bad news on several counts: it makes the fruit hard to protect from birds and hard to harvest, and the tree hard to squeeze into a small city garden. That's why a new dwarf cherry rootstock is good news.

The rootstock is called 'Gisela' (or sometimes 'Geissen', for its German city of origin), and it comes in several similar forms. Starting this winter, you should be able to find more than a dozen major varieties of cherries, from 'Bing' to 'Van', grafted onto this dwarf rootstock. All bear fruit a year or two after planting. The first ones on the market should keep most kinds of sweet cherry trees at less than half the size of those on standard rootstocks, such as 'Mazzard'. At Washington State University's Prosser Research Center, trees have been growing for about 6 years, and they're all under 15 feet tall.

Availability of these dwarf trees will be spotty this first year and prices will be high--$2 to $4 more per tree than cherries on standard rootstocks. Not all cherries labeled "dwarf" are on 'Gisela' roots, so be sure to ask before you buy. Cherries aren't recommended for the desert.

Cherry trees on 'Gisela' roots are also being sold by Raintree Nursery, 391 Butts Rd., Morton, Wash. 98356; write for a free catalog.

New petunias and a black-eyed Susan

Each new year ushers in a fresh crop of garden catalogs trumpeting flower introductions, including new plants judged as All-America Selections by the seed industry. The flowers look great on catalog pages, but how do they perform in the garden? To find out, we grew the three 1995 AAS winners--two petunias and a black-eyed Susan--in Sunset's gardens in Menlo Park, California, last summer.

'Purple Wave' is a new class of petunia that hugs the ground. This plant grows only 4 to 6 inches tall and spreads to 4 feet wide, making it suitable for use as a seasonal ground cover or in hanging baskets. But the most outstanding thing about this petunia is the deep, intensely iridescent purple of its flowers. The blooms are about 2 inches across. Space plants 3 feet apart.

'Celebrity Chiffon Morn', an improved multiflora petunia called a floribunda, was chosen for its beautiful pastel pink flowers, produced in great profusion on plants that reach 18 inches tall. This petunia tolerates heat and some drought. Space plants 6 to 12 inches apart.

Rudbeckia hirta 'Indian Summer', a new black-eyed Susan, is a standout in the summer garden. Plants produce huge 6- to 9-inch-wide, single or double golden yellow blooms all season long. The 3- to 4-foot-tall plants branch freely at the base. Space plants 1 to 2 feet apart.

Look for these plants at nurseries this spring. All three do best in full sun and well-amended soil.

A multimedia garden catalog

Books, videos, and computer software each do different things well, so it's nice to be able to pick and choose when you're looking for gardening information. A new mail-order catalog from A. C. Burke & Co. lets you choose among all three.

The catalog specializes in products that will help you with garden planning, design, and problem-solving. Computer software is mostly geared to IBM-compatible machines, but some Macintosh software is available.

For a free catalog, write to A.C. Burke & Co., 2554 Lincoln Blvd., Suite 1058, Marina del Rey, Calif. 90291.