Broken Colors Four-O'Clock Flower Seeds

This gorgeous Four O'Clock seems to plan its magnificent show around your schedule! Just as you arrive home from work, when everything else in the garden is furling shut, Broken Colors is opening its carnival of bicolor and pattterned blooms, ready to delight dinner guests on the patio or enrich your quiet evening stroll through the garden! A single 36-inch plant produces myriad 1- to 2-inch trumpet-shaped blooms in all combinations of raspberry, lemon-yellow, orange-golden, and frosty-white. The only thing they have in common--aside from their beauty and soft, Pansy-like texture--is that each is a color riot, from striping to stippling to streaking!

Until recently, the old-fashioned, multicolored Mirabilis, known as Miracle of Peru, was believed to be lost to horticulture--the modern strains produce only solid-colored blooms. Then a few specimens were located, and years of breeding were undertaken to produce this festive update!

Best of all, Broken Colors is super-easy to grow! Sow the seeds in place as soon as the soil is warm in spring. Space about 1 1/2 to 2 feet apart in full sun and any well-drained soil. Heat- and drought-tolerant, the plants bloom all summer!

Four o'Clock has another valuable use in the garden besides its beauty and fragrance. It is a magnet for Japanese Beetles, so if your Roses and veggies are plagued by this pest, consider surrounding them with Four o'Clocks. Then, once the plants begin blooming, just go around in the late afternoon or early evening with a pail of soapy water and strip the Japanese Beetles off the flowers, dropping them into the soapy water (which kills them). Especially effective near Roses, berries, potatoes, and corn.