UT Gardens Event Wins National Educational Award

The Blooms Days Garden Festival and Marketplace offers visitors more than just a relaxing day outdoors, or so says All-America Selections®, a non-profit organization that supports the testing of new flowers and vegetables for home gardening. All-America Selections® has named the University of Tennessee Gardens - specifically the Gardens\' 2006 Blooms Days Garden Festival and Marketplace - as its Category II Exemplary Education Award winner. The award recognizes top gardens in each of three categories, based on the estimated number of visitors received during their growing season: Category I - up to 4,999 visitors; Category II - 5,000-99,999; and Category III - 100,000 or more visitors. The UT Gardens on Neyland Drive in Knoxville annually receives in excess of 50,000 visitors. An AAS Display Garden since 1974, and an official AAS Trial Ground since 1983, the UT Gardens is a forum at which an All-America Selections Display Garden is exhibited to the public. In June 2006, the fourth annual Blooms Days in the Gardens highlighted AAS Winners in the trial program. The event was sponsored by the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station in cooperation with the Friends of the UT Gardens. It focused attention on research and demonstrations and an educational program designed to teach the public about vegetables, flowers, herbs, gardening, and horticulture. The festival included garden seminars (more than 17 different topics each day), gardening demonstrations, a staffed Plant Doctor table, Q&A stations, musical performances, and a marketplace featuring handcrafted garden goods and plants. Children\'s activities included botanical story time, make-and-take botanical crafts, an insect zoo and butterfly house and face painting. Promoted on television, radio, billboards, posters, and the www.friendsoftheutgardens.org Web site, the Blooms Days \'06 event attracted 2100 visitors. The 2007 event is planning to be even bigger. It is scheduled for June 23 and 24. All-America Selections® is celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2007 and features more than 180 display gardens in North America. These gardens grow AAS Winners for the public to view, promote gardening, and provide educational programs or events. A listing of AAS Display Gardens is available on the AAS Web site: http://www.all-americaselections.org. This is the fifth year the AAS Board has provided the opportunity for AAS Display Gardens to achieve national recognition for outstanding education featuring the AAS program and AAS winners. Entries were judged on event substance, educational content and quality of event publicity. Presentation style, originality, materials and garden display were also considered.