Best hanging basket flowers

[buttercrumble]

Please any suggestions welcome, ideally colourful and trailing flowers . Long lasting and hardy, thankyou

I am very fond of growing varieties of tumbling tomatoes and marigolds in my hanging baskets. Unusual but very tasty. I like lobelia as well.

Mixed violas are hardy because they are winter flowering (or something) so are tough. My one basket is full of violas that i planted out about 6 ish weeks ago. since then, my basket its now an impressive ball of green leaves and masses of mixed colour flower heads, and i did nothing other than just leave and the odd water every day or so. I love to look at it.

everything else by contrast, is just only beginning to show flowers.

I planted up my hanging baskets this morning. The 2 back ones are petunia balls with a mix of different colour petunias. In one i have a mix of cherry, red and raspberry ripple. In the other i have purple and a white one with lilac stripes.
The front basket is more of a mix with petunia, millon bells, trailing fushia and trailing geranium.

For the last couple of years I have only planted geraniums in my baskets. I use a variegated trailing type and big upright ones in the middle and they look great, don' t mind being thirsty and are very hardy. Dead-heading very straightforward. Prior to that I was very creative with my planting but I used to fret about the garden on holiday and when I realised how good the geraniums looked in hot places with very little watering, I became converted. I also grew mine from seed last year which was really successful but DH got peed off with little pots on window sills. His loss, saved a bomb on plants in 2012.

Lobelia.

I had some in last autmn's basket that were still in flower in January!

They are my very favourites.

Thanks everyone, lots of great suggestions . Just need some nice weather now.

At the moment, I have in my hanging baskets: Red upright geranium / Pelargonium in the centre for the same reasons Winceywoo gave. They are surrounded by purple violas and orange nasturtium with strawberries and lobelia round the edges.

Winceywoo great minds think alike - geranium wise and name wise