All-American Selections Program

With the new year comes the rainbow of colorful catalogs spilling with the latest flowers and vegetables, and you’ll undoubtedly find them peppered with the distinctive logo for the All-America Selections award.

This is one of the few award programs focused on the home gardener. Unique in today’s marketplace, the All-America Selections program (AAS) is not a brand affiliated with a marketing organization or a particular company, plant breeder or distribution company. It is a contest, a rigorous unbiased garden trial and evaluation that helps identify the best new plant varieties.

Established in 1932, the goal was to provide gardening and farm publications and the budding garden club movement with reliable information on the best new garden seeds. The program was a great success, and over the years the award has become a trusted indicator of a good plant choice for the garden.

Each year companies submit their latest flower and vegetable seeds for consideration for the award. Trial gardens must meet some rather exacting criteria, and are distributed across North America in 30 states and five Canadian provinces. We are fortunate to have three of these trial sites in Michigan, one in East Lansing on the Michigan State University campus, another near Grand Rapids, and a third in Litchfield (south of I-94 and East of I-69 South). 

Plants must be new and previously untried, and are evaluated for significant improvement over existing varieties of their type. For flowers, this includes novel flower forms or colors, flowers showing above the foliage, fragrance, length of flowering season, and pest and disease tolerance. For vegetables, earliness to harvest, total yield, fruit taste and fruit quality, ease of harvest, plant habit and disease or pest resistance.

Judges must be skilled and impartial, and are qualified and trained by AAS to apply standard criteria when evaluating the plants. Judges are not paid for their participation, and are typically horticultural professionals from academic and industry backgrounds. Each fall, the scores are tallied and awards announced to the horticultural press, cooperative extension agents and garden clubs, with no consumer-direct promotion from the AAS.

In addition to the trial gardens for evaluation of the potential new winners, AAS encourages display gardens for plants that have won the award. Gardens may feature the vegetable or flower winners, or both, and can be found in 45 states, the District of Columbia, six Canadian provinces and Japan. In Michigan, you’ll find them in Frankenmuth, Kalamazoo, Midland’s Dow Gardens, Tipton’s Hidden Lake Gardens, and near the trial gardens in East Lansing and Lichtfield.

The AAS supplies these gardens with seed of about 50 varieties, including current year winners, four years previous winners, and a preview of the next year’s winners. Gardens are required to have access to a greenhouse to grow the seed for transplant, provide an attractive setting, good presentation, and ensure that displays are well-labeled for visitors.

The program continues to evolve, and in 2013 a new award designation was added for regional winners. Program leaders realized that gardening success is very much climate-dependent. The rigorous testing might show, for example, that a plant is very well-suited for the humidity and heat of our summers, but fail to win a national award because it falters in the dry extremes of the southwest.  A regional award will highlight those more specialized plants for gardeners in their ideal climate.

New for 2015, AAS is expanding the program beyond seed-grown plants—for the first time also considering those that are vegetatively propagated. 

Over the next few weeks I will highlight the latest winners, options to consider as you peruse those catalogs for spring planting ideas.