Oct 15, 2015

AAS Bestows Industry AwardsSource: All-America Selections

All-America Selections honored two acclaimed horticulture visionaries at its annual AAS Awards Banquet at the Dallas Arboretum in Dallas,Texas with the AAS Medallion of Honor and the AAS Breeder’s Cup.

Dr. Elisabeth Sahin-Georgiadou was the recipient of the AAS Medallion of Honor, an award designed to recognize someone with a lifelong dedication to advancement in the field of horticulture. As the co-founder and general manager of K. Sahin Zaden, Elisabeth created a company that was known around the world for quality products (what she terms “Plants with a twist”) and exceptional personnel.

Elisabeth began her love of flowers early on when collecting wild flowers while visiting her grandparents in Pophos, Cyprus and continued that love through her Ph.D at Reading in the U.K. Elisabeth and her husband Kees established their breeding company in 1983 to continue to upgrade the garden flowers and their breeding was instrumental in introducing new genera and further work with established garden favorites.

The recipient of the AAS Breeders Cup Award was Dr. Randy Gardner, a renowned tomato breeder, at the NCSU’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in Fletcher, North Carolina. The AAS Breeders Cup Award recognizes a plant breeder who dramatically influenced horticulture by breeding new cultivars that brought significant improvements to those classes.

Dr. Gardner has developed the majority of the vine-ripened tomato acreage that is now planted in the Eastern United States. His accomplishments include 57 tomato releases with 22 finished hybrids and 35 breeding lines as well as work on disease resistance including early blight, late blight, fusarium wilt race 3, tomato spotted wilt virus.

For more information on the awards, please visit http://all-americaselections.org.