When January rolls around, it is with great pleasure I bring to you the most recent AAS winners. All America Selections (AAS) is a non-profit trialling organization that tests new, never-before-sold varieties of plants for the home gardener. After a full season of anonymous trialling by volunteer horticultural professionals, only the top garden performers are given the AAS Winner award designation for their superior performance. The AAS Winner label is like a stamp of approval as their mission is to promote new garden varieties with superior garden performance.
AAS is therefore the place to go for the next best thing to guarantee success in your garden. Once or twice each decade there is an AAS Gold Medal Award that honours a breeding breakthrough. Standard AAS National Winner designation recognizes an ornamental or edible that shows significant breeding achievements, and demonstrates superior garden performance compared to other varieties available. Judges also evaluate characteristics such as earliness, taste, disease-resistance, uniqueness and more depending on the species. AAS Regional Winner designation is given to varieties that do not perform exceptionally in all regions but in specific regions of North America. certain regions are named AAS Regional Winners. The AAS Winners offer gardeners reliable new varieties of plants to grow in your garden.
The 2023 winners will be available for purchase for the gardening season as supply becomes available. It is sometimes difficult to get the seed or the plants desired when the winners are just announced but if you go to the All America Selections website, they list the seed houses that sell seed of the winning plants. The url is https://all-americaselections.org/buy-winners/
There is now another coleus that can grace our gardens. Coleus Premium Sun Coral Candy was the 2023 Ornamental Seed Winner. Coral Candy boasts unique multicolored foliage on a uniformly compact plant. The narrow, serrated leaves gracefully drape down the neat and mounded plant and it only takes three seeds to produce enough substance to fill a 14 – 16-inch container. It also holds up nicely through the fall and even late in the season has almost no flowers.
Another first this year is the 2023 Ornamental Winner in the non-seed container trial. Colocasia Royal Hawaiian® Waikiki has sturdy, large glossy leaves that unfurl with a bold leaf coloration that feature pink veins and creamy white centres. Waikiki is part of the Royal Hawaiian series and produces these colours earlier than other variegated leaf colocasia. This lush, compact plant holds up well even in wind and rain, surely to bring a touch of the tropics to your garden.
There was one other Ornamental Seed Winner and that was the Snapdragon DoubleShot™ Orange Bicolour F1. This selection is part of a new series of intermediate-height snaps that are perfect for the garden or as cut flowers. These stunning open-faced double flowers emerge in beautiful warm shades of orange and orange-red that transition to a dusty shade as they age. The stem is strong and well-branched which results in a higher flower count that produces romantic flowers all season long. This plant was trialed in both containers and in the ground so you can try this snapdragon with confidence.
Watch next week for more of the selections that are considered winners.
Registration ends on Jan. 13 for attendance in the online course Growing Food Indoors in Winter.
Hanbidge is the Lead Horticulturist with Orchid Horticulture. Find us at www.orchidhort.com; by email at info@orchidhort.com; on facebook @orchidhort and on instagram at #orchidhort.
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