A Look Inside the International Plant Trialing Conference
2025 International Plant Trialing Conference event logo. | All-America Selections (AAS)
When you spend all season evaluating plants, it’s easy to get buried in scores, spreadsheets, and photos. Hosted by All-America Selections and the National Garden Bureau, the International Plant Trialing Conference returned this year after a decade-long break, giving trial managers a rare chance to step away from their plots, compare notes, and talk about how to do the work better. Organizers have already committed to bringing it back in 2028. Following the event, we asked several attendees what they’re taking back to their own programs.
A Trialing Community That Actually Shares
Melinda Knuth, Assistant Professor and Director of the Cognitive Behavior Lab in Horticultural Science at North Carolina State University, was struck by how collaborative it felt. Her key takeaway was that trialing companies are genuinely open to sharing how they do things, and she found it “refreshing” to see how well this corner of the industry works together.
Audrey Brill, Trial Garden Coordinator at Green Legacy, felt the same way. She left with what she called “an overwhelming sense of gratitude” for the professionals who were willing to share their experience with people just starting out. That mix of seasoned trial managers and newer voices, all comparing experiences, was a throughline in many of the responses.
For Denise Mullins, Director of Product Innovation at Smith Gardens, it was the mix of people — greenhouse growers, universities, botanical gardens, breeders, brokers, and tech companies — all focused on the same question: how do we make trials better?
Designing Trials with the End in Mind
A recurring theme across responses was being more deliberate about why a trial exists and who it is for.
Young’s Plant Farm Marketing Manager Beverly Ogburn highlighted “intentional trial planning” as a major lesson. Not just picking varieties but thinking ahead about trial objectives, environmental variables, data points to track, and what success really looks like for each crop. She also noticed differences in how small and large operations approach that planning, with smaller growers leaning more on flexible, observational notes and photography, and larger growers often using more formal methods like standardized scoring and multi-location validation.
Brill is taking a similar mindset back to Green Legacy. One of her top takeaways was the importance of focusing on the customer when designing trials. For her, that means building trials that collect data landscapers will actually use and making sure every new project starts with clearly defined main objectives.
Chad Miller, Associate Professor and CSU Trial Gardens Director at Colorado State University, echoed the importance of clarity around reporting. After listening to the panel on effective trial reports, he said it reinforced the idea that there’s no need for “too much reporting.” The goal is to meet the agreed-upon objectives and make sure the report is appropriate for its audience.
Photos, Photos, and More Photos
If there was an unofficial conference mantra, it might have been: take better pictures.
“Photos. Photos. Photos,” is how Miller sums up his takeaway. He heard repeatedly that a strong image can tell cooperators almost as much as a table of numbers, especially when they can’t visit every site. Height, width, and timing still matter, but good photos are now a core part of the data set. Brill also put “the importance of good pictures” at the top of her list. As she thinks about landscape-focused trials, photography will be a key tool for showing real-world performance.
Black-eyed Susan Rudbeckia hirta ‘Autumn Colors’ (Benary). | Colorado State University (CSU)
Ogburn served on a panel about showcasing trial gardens and results to the broader industry, where strong visuals like photography, flip books, video walkthroughs, and digital storytelling were all highlighted as ways to elevate breeder and customer engagement. She also attended a panel on marketing trials to consumers that focused on bridging the gap between professional trial sites and homeowner decision-making, and on showing performance in relatable, real-life scenarios.
Smarter Tools, Cleaner Data
Ogburn’s notes describe a shift toward “digital trialing.” She heard many growers talk about:
- Mobile apps for in-field notes and scoring.
- Cloud-based systems for storing images and weekly observations.
- Software that can auto-generate performance reports or compare year-over-year results.
Some operations are building fully custom internal apps, while others rely on existing industry platforms, but the shared priorities she heard were efficiency, consistency, and accessibility.
Mullins came away focused on similar themes. Among her “lessons learned” were the value of deeper conversations about data storage and collection within apps, and the importance of SOPs for training new staff on basic trialing processes. She also emphasized communication, both within the company and outside of it, and the need to market their trial garden event in ways that reach people beyond greenhouse growers.
Brill, meanwhile, is preparing to move deeper into structured data collection starting in 2026 and said she appreciated the “tips and tricks” panelists shared around building that kind of system from the ground up.
New Directions and Next Steps
The conference also nudged some programs toward new content areas.
Miller mentioned sessions on edible crops interspersed in ornamental trials that he wanted to attend as particularly interesting, pointing to ongoing conversations about integrating vegetables and other edibles.
Brill highlighted sessions on cut flower trialing as especially useful; Green Legacy plans to start cut flower trials in 2026, alongside ramped-up data collection.
For Ogburn, the event offered a wider view of how trials connect to marketing, partnerships, and even career paths in horticulture. She called the conference “incredibly enlightening” and said she left with a much deeper understanding of the full trialing ecosystem, from planning to data collection to marketing. A careers-focused panel was, in her words, surprisingly inspiring, and underscored how many different roles and skill sets feed into trialing work.
Their takeaways show how one conference can shape the way trials are planned, documented, and shared long after the last session ends.
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