Spreading the word

All-America Selections celebrates its 80th anniversary this year, and as part of the celebration, Greenhouse Management will interview a different AAS judge each month to talk about how he or she runs his or her business and what AAS means to them. This is the second installment of the 12-part series.

When Jimmy Turner was a guest on Martha Stewart Radio, he was shocked the host hadn’t heard of All-America Selections.

The senior director of gardens for the Dallas Arboretum & Botanical Garden listened as the radio host talked about there being a great fear that when someone buys seeds that they may not do well for them and how difficult seeds often are to grow, and he asked Turner to recommend seeds to start with.

“I said, ‘I don’t have to suggest seeds – just go to allamerciaselections.org and every vegetable seed, fruit seed, and the best flowers and the best peppers, you can go right there. I don’t care where you’re at in the U.S., it’s been tested across the U.S.,’” Turner says. “Martha Stewart Radio should know everything – you didn’t know about AAS? We all assume everyone knows what AAS is, but they don’t, so I try to push it as much as possible.”

Turner oversees a two-acre trial garden testing more than 5,000 plants at the Dallas Arboretum, or as the rest of the AAS world knows it as, “The killing fields,” due to the extreme heat combined with the heavy rains.

“Plants don’t love us,” Turner says with a laugh.

But that’s precisely why AAS is effective. If a plant can weather the extremes of Texas, consumers can rest assured it will work in their backyard – wherever that is.

“If it’s an AAS winner, it’s going to be great no matter where you’re at,” he says. “It’s a great thing about it. We all get to see the results. I get to see the results from all the different trial sites across the nation, which is a bunch of them. I never have any fear with AAS that their winners won’t do well.”

Turner says a lot of work goes into the trialing and that many people don’t realize how much work it really is and how high the standards are.

“They send out hundreds of packets of seeds and people have to take data in the worse kind of weather,” he says. “It was 112 here, and we’re standing out there saying, ‘Does this look good today? I’m about to die, but it looks OK.’ They do all that to compile the data, but for every winner, there’s 10 plants that didn’t make the cut. There’s a lot of work that goes into it. People think we just go say, ‘Oh that’s a pretty xenia or that’s a pretty marigold,’ but no, it’s not just it’s a pretty one. It’s put in the garden, compared to plants in the market that grow like it, and it has to actually do what it says it does.”

But it’s not just the end consumers that benefit from AAS. Garden Centers and growers can ultimately gain a lot of knowledge to help them educate that end consumer and encourage them to try certain products.

“It has winners left and right and has promoted plants, and tit for tat, they help sell plants to keep nurseries and garden centers in business,” Turner says. “We need to promote AAS so the consumer knows, ‘Hey this is a proven brand, this has been around a while ... .’ It helps out both sides. I don’t think there’s any single winner – everybody wins with AAS.”

For more: Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden, www.dallasarboretum.org; All-America Selections, www.all-americaselections.org