I am a sucker for chartreuse leaves. So, when I first saw the Picasso in Purple® Supertunia® at a local garden center, I stopped dead in my tracks. The flowers were a bright pinkish purple with chartreuse edges. It was love at first sight. Not only was the flower stunning, but the plant wasn’t a regular petunia; it was a Supertunia®, which I already knew would produce a voluptuous display in the urns next to my front steps.

I had always wondered how the landscapers at a nearby shopping mall grew such luscious, overflowing displays of petunias in containers and hanging baskets, and I finally figured out their secret when I stumbled on the Supertunia®. The plants were such abundant producers of flowers that it made me curious to learn more about them, and their backstory turned out to be fascinating.

According to Louis Pasteur, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” and that was indeed the case back in 1984 when plant breeder Ushio Sakazaki happened upon “a wild species of petunia with thousands of flowers on one plant, like a carpet” while working in Brazil for the Suntory Company. Returning to Japan with seeds from the wild petunia, Sakazaki crossed it with a domesticated variety, and a new profusely blooming variety of petunia was born. A partnership between Suntory and MNP, a company in The Netherlands, was launched to market the new petunia hybrids as Surfinias®. They were clearly a hit. According to the Surfinia® website, 65 million were sold in Europe in 2010.

So, how does that explain the backstory of the Supertunia®? An article on GreenhouseGrower.com explains that Sakazaki’s success with the petunia hybrid allowed him to form his own company, and he subsequently partnered with Proven Winners in the United States who registered the Supertunia® trademark. When I finally realized that Surfinia® and Supertunia® were just different brand names for similar types of hybrids, the mystery was solved. I know that some people find the Latin names for plants difficult, but I prefer them over brand names. To Shakespeare, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but a Rosa carolina is always going to be a Rosa carolina, and for me, that is so much easier to understand.  

And in another twist to the story, it turns out that Picasso in Purple® was patented, not by Ushio Sakazaki, but by Gavriel Danziger and the Danziger Flower Farm in Israel. According to the patent, it was discovered in 2013 from a cross between a male plant with purple flowers and a female plant with purple-veined white flowers and green margins. So, although Sakazaki is the plant breeding genius behind the massively floriferous petunia hybrids, other plant breeders have clearly entered the fray.

I’ll leave you with a close-up of Picasso in Purple®. Every time I look at it, I am thankful for the international effort that brought such beautiful flowers to my garden.

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