Garden-of-Eden

Petunias - as we like them.

I'm quoting this from Margaret Maron's post "THINKING OF THALASSA" because it amused me. Maybe it should be "Magenta the Motivator" from now on:

I remembered one of Thalassa’s shows in which she went on a long rant about how her red hybrid petunias reverted to this same sickly pinkish-purple.  Left alone, petunias will reseed themselves and come back year after year, but seeds from red petunias do not come up with red flowers.  They come up purply.  Because so many hybrid flowers of the red, pink and blue color range tend to revert, she and her mother called the color Garden-of-Eden purple and amused themselves (and us) by hypothesizing that all the original flowers must have been this color and that it wasn’t until Eve got kicked out of the garden that the colors became more varied.

Self-sown  petunias

The picture of the self-sown petunias is from The Online Plant Guide. They have several other pictures as well, all proving Thalassa Cruso's point.