Years ago I used to plant Fantasy (milliflora) petunias in the front of my flower borders. They started blooming earlier than most of my other annuals and made a gorgeous display for most of June into early July. But then they would stop blooming and get leggy, and although I attempted to revive them by cutting them back and fertilizing regularly, they never quite recovered. Eventually I stopped growing them.
Last winter I spotted ‘Picobella Light Blue’ milliflora petunias in one of the seed catalogs and decided to give the Picobella series a try. I’m a sucker for light blue petunias (the light blue color was always my favorite in the Fantasy series too) so I sprouted some of those as well as plants in pink, rose, red, blue and white.
Once again the light blue ones were my favorite:
I would love to say my story has a happy ending, but the Picobellas behaved the same as the Fantasy petunias. They bloomed like crazy but then pooped out in July, got leggy, turned brown and were eventually buried by the nearby Profusion zinnias.
I also grew some Picobellas in a barrel. Unfortunately they behaved in the same flash-in-the-pan style. By mid-July I contemplated yanking them out.
Perhaps this is just an unfortunate characteristic of milliflora petunias. They are so pretty when they are blooming their fool heads off, but to me they just aren’t worth it for 5 weeks of awesome. They probably make more sense for a botanical garden where plants are constantly replaced throughout the season.