With hundreds of thousands of plant species in the world, choosing the right ones for your home garden can be a daunting and perhaps even overwhelming task.
Fortunately, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society offers a useful guide for beginning and professional growers alike to get a sense of what plants will best suit their landscapes.
Established in 1978 and updated annually, the Gold Medal Plants program honors flowers, trees, shrubs and vines most ideal for gardens in the Philadelphia area, as well as New Jersey, Delaware and parts of New England.
The Gold Medal Plant committee, which includes various local industry professionals, judges plants based on a lengthy list of criteria, including whether they’re “suitable to our climate and our soils,” says Jenny Rose Carey, senior director at Meadowbrook Farm in Jenkintown.
But there’s much more to consider, Carey says, like how easily the plant can be grown and tended to and how resistent to pests and diseases it is.
Plus, obviously, the plant should be easy on the eyes.
“It shouldn’t be just an ugly old thing,” says Carey. “It should look good in a landscape. That might mean things like good leaf quality or color. Maybe it’s just a beautiful overall form in the landscape. Or maybe it has lovely bark or berries.” Maintaining its beauty through multiple seasons is a huge bonus, she adds.
After several decades, the list of Gold Medal Plants has grown to around 160, all of which are easily searchable on the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s online database (pshonline.org/programs/gold-medal-plants). It’s a useful resource for any beginning gardener.
From the Chinese Trumpetcreeper to the Gold Rush Dawn Redwood, Gold Medal Plants are hardy, colorful and carefully chosen by the committee’s many expert horticulturists – “high-level gardeners,” as Carey puts it.
These are people who grow “a lot of these plants and can actually evaluate them,” she says. “They’re not just looking at the books and saying, ‘Oh yes, this is a very nice plant,’ but actually have the real-life experience of it.
“This is a team approach. So you’re getting the best brains of many different nursery and professional horticulturists to say, ‘Yes, I think this is a very good plant and well-worth growing.'”
The Gold Medal Plant program, which will have a presence during the Philadelphia Flower Show in the form of an information desk, is a great resource for the gardening public, Carey says, one that, “you hope, has improved people’s landscapes” over the years.
PHS hopes that overall the program has improved the quality of the gardens around here, she says. “For our area, it is a very useful resource, and we hope people are using it, because it’s something PHS is doing as a service to the horticultural community, really.”
