Top Varieties for the 2025 Season

Your stand-out plants for 2025

The Ball Summer Showcase in its Oxfordshire Trial Grounds 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.

“This Summer’s Showcase has been probably one of the best presentations for many years. The challenging weeks of cold wet weather leading up to the July event was a real test for the plant varieties, providing visitors a perfect opportunity to see real garden performance. We were delighted by how incredibly well the plants genetics stood up to the weather, testament to the amazing work of the plant breeders! It was also so encouraging to see how much the displays and trials are valued and utilised by growers, retail buyers and landscapers in planning for their 2025 season. The New Varieties Theatre was as always extremely well received, providing all those who came an exclusive preview of what will be new in the 2025 catalogues” Stuart Lowen, Marketing Manager

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 ‘Bue Flag’.

We counted these flags every day for over 4 weeks and are delighted to share these results with you. Over 1,500 votes were cast, providing a most useful measure of what look to be the ‘stand-out’ plants for 2025:

NEW Lantana Passion Fruit

A stunning Lantana for a fruity-looking basket!

Our visitor’s clear favourite at the Ball Colegrave Summer Showcase was this very special spreading, trailing Lantana, with abundant flowers, dark green leaves and a perfect habit for spectacular hanging baskets.

The most striking plump multi-coloured flowers of hot pink, orange and yellow are reminiscent of ‘Fruit Salad’ sweets! The plants never cycle out of flower providing colour all summer long. And, although the flowers look delicate, this annual is as tough as nails, perfect in full sun, heat and drought tolerant and is highly attractive to pollinators. Height and spread: 30-41cm.

Available in a Leg 84 and Leg 128 Tray. A high impact colour Ball label is supplied with the plugs.

NEW Coleus Sunfighter Solar Flare

Colossal Colour without a Flower!

Coleus Coral Candy was the 2023 Summer Showcase favourite foliage variety, and this year our stunning new Coleus Solare Flare has grabbed all the attention. It just looked great all summer, so wasn’t surprising there were blue flags in this container every day we had visitors.

‘Solar Flare’ joins the ‘Sunfighter’ series of spectacular and robust Coleus, delivering a strong branching plant with high impact colour, ideal for fast finishing in 1-2 litre pot retail programmes.

The distinct and stable leaf pattern holds it colour in sun or semi-shade right through the season, delivering an incredible low maintenance foil for combination planters or used as a standalone specimen. Garden height 50-75cm.

Available in a Paper 66 Tray and Leg Tray 84. A high impact colour Ball label is supplied with the plugs.

NEW Cosmos Cherry Chocolate

A stunning new colour breakthrough of the popular Chocolate Cosmos!

Runner up at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show ‘Plant Of The Year’, this lovely form produces purple buds that boast large fuchsia-pink blooms with bright golden pollen, along with an enticing, rich chocolate fragrance.

Compared to other forms of atrisanguineus, ‘Cherry Chocolate’ produces flowers that are twice the size! making it the largest flowering form.

With the potential of a 5-month-long flowering period, this compact perennial is a reliable source of continuous colour in the garden and food for friendly pollinators. A low-maintenance garden perennial, with minimal pruning required thanks to the naturally compact habit. Garden height 60cm.

Available as a Paper 66 and 128 Leg Tray. Plant into a 2-3 litre pot, with a single pinch once rooted and grow on outside or under a well-ventilated polytunnel.

Ball Trial Grounds in the UK
Ball in the UK has been conducting plant variety trials and customer open days from their Trial Grounds in West Adderbury for 62 years.
Today’s Trial Grounds not only presents the companies assortment of catalogue varieties in a rich display of settings and retail ideas, but also comprehensively evaluates hundreds 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 performs under UK growing conditions!
Trials are conducted all year round with an open house for customers during autumn, spring and summer. Over 25,000 Annual and Perennial plants are bedded out in the summer trial and display beds with an excess of 5,000 pot plants and 2,000 patio baskets/containers are planted up for the event.
Traditionally the Trial Grounds were attended by Parks and Nurserymen. Today they are joined by an ever-increasing number of Retail Plant Buyers looking for new plant and retail solutions.