Whimsical winners of AAS Display Garden Landscape

Added on 16 October 2023

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Whimsical winners of AAS Display Garden Landscape

DOWNERS GROVE, IL – All-America Selections is pleased to announce the winners of their 2023 Landscape Design Challenge. This year’s theme of “A Whimsical Garden” was, in the beginning, one that created some cautious interest and more than one online search to see what could be done with such an unusual theme.

But the AAS Display Gardens came through again in a big way!

The AAS Display Gardens were tasked with using their AAS Winning flowers and plants in and around a theme of “A Whimsical Garden!” and each garden staff came up with a wide variety of ways to showcase their own garden’s whimsy in and among their AAS Winners!

For the challenge, AAS provided the gardens with recent AAS Winner seeds and plants along with variety markers that for the first time, included a QR code that sends users to the AAS website for that variety.

The gardens had the option to also incorporate older AAS Winners in their design to illustrate the theme. Gardens were encouraged to generate publicity and hold events to share the story of All-America Selections and AAS Winners.

Gardens are divided into three categories based on the number of visitors per year:

Category I: fewer than 10,000 visitors per year

Category II: 10,001 – 100,000 visitors per year

Category III: Over 100,000 visitors per year

All-America Selections recognizes and thanks the contest judges who are industry experts in the field of horticulture and landscaping:

Helen Battersby, Garden Writer/Speaker & GardenComm director, international region.
Ron Cramer, Retired, Sakata Ornamentals and AAS Former President
Barbara Wise, Sales and Marketing Manager, Crescent Garden

AAS is proud to announce the following winning gardens from the 2023 Design Challenge:

Category I: Under 10,000 visitors per year

First Place Winner: Mississippi State Univ-South Mississippi Branch Experiment Station, Poplarville, Mississippi

The AAS Display Garden at Mississippi State University’s South Miss Branch Experiment Station is a whimsical garden with a bridge, gazebo, and ornamental hardscape features. The garden features 24 ornamental and 10 vegetable AAS-winning varieties. Visitors can enjoy the flow of the color palette as they walk through the garden, starting with reds and pinks at the entryway and leading to blues, purples, and whites on the other side. After brainstorming, the garden staff agreed that a wacky, silly, odd, and overall fun approach would be the way to go to interpret this year’s theme. Going back to the 16th-century origin of the word ‘whimsical’, they learned that it started with ‘whim-wham’; a noun meant to describe an ornamental object or trinket. This “whim-wham” approach led to the integration of many ornamental hardscape features, such as a small bridge over a dry creek bed and a gazebo used to showcase AAS Winners in hanging planters and traditional garden plantings. Garden visitors enjoyed the whimsical theme and all the fun “stuff” to find in the garden. One visitor described it as a “non-stop, visually eye-catching array of whimsical features that transport you to a place where worries are carried away on the backs of fairies, gnomes, and porcelain frogs!”