New year brings opportunities to try award-winning plants

As the new year approaches, gardeners get excited. It's a fresh chance to make our gardens the best ever.

Part of the excitement is the chance to try brand-new varieties. It's always great fun to pore over the latest garden publications and the new crop of seed and nursery catalogs, looking for offerings that promise to delight us.

Sometimes new varieties live up to the hype, sometimes not. But over many years of gardening, I've learned I can always depend on any variety that earns an All-America Selections award. An extensive independent trial program virtually guarantees that AAS winners are top-notch performers.

The number of winners varies from year to year. For 2008, there are three: two flowers and one vegetable.

• Asti White osteospermum boasts large, white, daisylike flowers with blue centers. What impressed me most about my trial plants was their vigor. Like other osteospermums, they took a break from blooming when the weather got hot. But unlike the others, they maintained their good health throughout impossibly hot summer temperatures and weeks without rain, resuming flowering as soon as cooler weather returned.

Asti White plants are easy to grow from seed, but they take as much as four months to start blooming. If you want early spring blooms from this cold-tolerant plant, you'll need to get started soon. If you'd rather not bother, started plants should also be available at garden centers in spring.

Asti White plants grow up to 20 inches tall and wide and bloom best in full sun.

• Skippy XL Plum-Gold viola is another great plant for cold-weather blooms. The flowers are small, but who cares? There are more than enough for an impressive show, literally covering the 6-inch-tall plants. Uniquely-colored blossoms have gold "faces" surrounded by plum shades, with radiating black lines or "whiskers."

I like the color but was even more impressed with the plants' vigor. While other varieties quickly collapsed in summer's heat, the winning viola carried on almost all summer. A few plants actually survived to bloom again in the fall. Allow a 10-week head start if you grow from seed.

• Hansel eggplant delighted me with a continuous harvest of skinny, glossy-purple fruits that proved to have few seeds and no bitterness. First of my eggplants to produce, the plants grew only about 2 feet tall, small enough to grow in a pot.

All-America Selections varieties are widely available from garden retailers and mail-order catalogs. You can find more information on All-America Selections, including a retail locator, at www.all-americaselections.org.