Wooster Twp.: Ladonna Whitt knows all plants are not created equal.
Some simply outshine their counterparts in the garden. They bloom longer, resist pests better, produce tastier crops or just look more stunning.
Those are the plants that win All-America Selections honors, and they’re the plants Whitt gets to try out at Ohio State University’s Agricultural Technical Institute.
Whitt is a floriculture technician who oversees the All-America Selections Display Garden at ATI, one of 13 such display gardens in Ohio. The gardens give the public an up-close and in-person view of plants that have been deemed superior in a testing and judging process managed by All-America Selections, a nonprofit organization dedicated to identifying plants that perform best in the garden.
ATI will feature its All-America Selections Display Garden during an open house from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. to noon next Saturday.
While the open house is required as part of ATI’s participation in the display garden program, the event will also give the campus the chance to show off the rest of its gardens, notably the exuberant annual gardens that surround its historical Raemelton Conservatory. This year those gardens were inspired by children’s books, their color palettes reflecting the books’ covers.
The gardens also serve as hands-on laboratories for students at ATI, a branch of Ohio State that awards associate’s degrees in agriculture, horticulture, environmental sciences, business and engineering technology. Students start the plants in the institute’s greenhouses and participate in maintaining them, although the university’s switch to a semester schedule in 2012 has left few students on campus in late spring to help with planting. Instead, the institute puts out a call for help to all its personnel, who can elect to help plant the gardens scattered around campus, said Frances Whited, ATI’s marketing and communications coordinator.
ATI’s All-America Selections plot isn’t the showiest of those gardens, but its purpose isn’t strictly ornamental. Whitt said the plot allows the institute to see how the plants perform in this region and report back to the organization.
This year the eight raised beds that make up the display garden are planted largely in vegetables — a response by All-America Selections to the growing interest in local foods, Whited said. There are also flowers, including Pinto Premium White to Rose geraniums, Profusion Double Hot Cherry zinnias and South Pacific Scarlet cannas, started from seed instead of the usual tubers.
The garden includes 2014 selections that aren’t on the market yet, as well as some selections from earlier years that are available to the public, Whitt said.
She fertilizes the gardens with chemical fertilizer, because that’s what most gardeners would use, she explained. She also tries to keep the beds weeded and the plants deadheaded, but she’s sometimes frustrated by the rabbits that abound on the campus. They’ve feasted on the kale, in particular, but she has more growing in a greenhouse so she can replace the chewed plants for the open house.
The event will include guided tours of the gardens, music by members of Wooster’s MacDowell Music Club and an opportunity to visit the Raemelton Conservatory and ATI’s greenhouses.
ATI is at 1328 Dover Road. Directions and a campus map are at http://tinyurl.com/ati directions.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.
