All America Selections Winners – A Cut Flower Trial

Shari Dutton

Jul 17, 2026

Where are the sites located?

The Arboretum’s home demonstration gardens: 500 Alumni Dr, Lexington, KY 40503
UK Robinson Center: 130 Robinson Rd, Jackson, KY 41339
The Horticulture Research Farm: 4321 Emmert Farm Ln, Lexington, KY 40514

What is an All-America Selections Winner?

All-America Selections Winners are plant varieties that have been trialed throughout North America and deemed superior in garden performance and characteristics. All-America Selections is the only national, non-profit plant trialing organization in North America. Only the top plant performers are given the AAS Winner award. Plant performance is scored and rated through a full season of anonymous trialing by volunteer horticulture professionals. AAS plant trials use two similar, current, market available varieties as “controls’ to help the judges score the new plant entries. Judges look for superior qualities from the entries such as earliness to bloom or harvest, disease or pest tolerance, novel color or flower form, length of flowering and overall cultivated performance as compared to the control varieties. The Arboretum in Lexington, Ky is a plant trialing site as well as a demonstration site! Entry to the Arboretum is free. Check out their website here: https://arboretum.mgcafe.uky.edu/

All America Selections Winners as cut flowers?

Shari Dutton, Extension Associate in horticulture for beginning specialty crop growers, and Shawn Wright, Extension Specialist in horticulture, are taking a look at a select number of AAS Winners for cut flower potential. When you explore AAS Winners, https://all-americaselections.org/winners/, you will see several pages of recent ornamental winners. A few of these ornamental winners have been filtered out as good choices for cut flower use by the trial garden judges. We wanted to see if these choices would stand up to the rigors of Ky’s commercial cut flower expectations. Our trial features 13 seed-grown AAS ornamental winners to be evaluated for commercial cut flower potential.