Posted on Feb 02, 2025
On Wednesday, 5 February 2025, our Club will welcome Dr. Chad Miller, Associate Professor of Landscape and Ornamental Horticulture and CSU Trial Gardens Director.
Dr Miller will introduce us to the CSU Trial Gardens located between Remington St and College Avenue in front of the University Center for the Arts.

 
The mission of the Trial Gardens  is to provide education, research and outreach to students, community members, industry professionals and anyone else with a desire to learn.  The outdoor display and test areas at the Annual Flower Trial Garden were established to allow students, researchers, industry representatives, homeowners and extension personnel to learn, teach and evaluate through horticultural research and demonstration projects conducted in the unique environmental conditions of the Rocky Mountain/High Plains region.
 
The Trial Garden began at the W. D. Holley Plant Environmental Research Center (PERC), located at 630 W. Lake Street on the Colorado State University campus. PERC was in operation from 1971 to 2016. In 1992, Dr. James E. Klett began his role as Director of PERC and became the Faculty Coordinator for the trial program. David Staats also joined the department around this time as a Horticulture Research Associate. Dr. Klett retired in 2022, and Dr. Chad Miller joined CSU as the new Trial Garden Director. Dr. Miller, David Staats, and several student employees coordinate, plant, and evaluate all of the activities required to produce a world-renowned beautiful and successful trial garden and program each year. The Pansy Trial program was initiated in 2003 to evaluate the capability of various pansy and viola varieties to overwinter in the Northern Colorado climate. The trial can be more broadly considered to be a Cool-season Crop Overwintering Trial, as other genera, such as Delphinium and Dianthus, have been trialed in the past. The Perennial Trial was initiated in the fall of 2006 at the request of our advisory committee. The objective of the Perennial Trial is to test only newer perennial cultivars introduced in the past three years or less.
 
Year after year, the number of participants in the trial and the number of trial entries has grown, leading to the demand for more and more space. In 2000, the Annual Flower Trial Garden was moved from its site at PERC to its current site.  The relocation of the garden to this more spacious and visible site furthered its mission by more effectively extending education, research and outreach to students, home gardeners, Master Gardeners, community members and Green Industry personnel. The 2.9 acre park features an additional 5,000 square feet of bedding plant space, resulting in 20,000 total square feet of bed space available for planting.  In 2016 a new multi-purpose stadium was built on the PERC site and the Perennial Demonstration Garden was moved just north of the CSU Center for the Arts and the Perennial Trials. Due to its close proximity of the Perennial Trials and the Annual Flower Trial across the street, the site is becoming known as the Fort Collins Garden and Art District.  Where as the Perennial Trial is a research site for newly developed plants within the past three years, the Perennial Demo Garden is a research site to observe perennials over a longer term.
Dr. Chad Miller earned his PhD in Ornamental Horticulture from Cornell University.  He was Associate Professor at Kansas State University before joining CSU and becoming Trial Garden Director in 2022.  In 2022 he was awarded the USDA Food and Ag Sciences Excellence Teacher Award and this year he was awarded Outstanding Undergraduate Educational Award by the American Society for Horticultural Sciences.
 
Chad Miller joined CSU and the faculty in landscape horticulture in the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture in 2023.  As a part of his teaching appointment, he teaches two plant identification courses, is a co-advisor of the Horticulture Club, and will advise students in the Environmental Horticulture concentrations.  Miller is the Director of the CSU Trial Gardens that include annual and perennial evaluations.  His research and extension program will continue the important collaboration with industry, further evaluating and promoting species improvement to work towards increasing sustainable, environmentally conscious plant selections that are not only aesthetically pleasing, but also are more adapted (e.g., heat, drought, pest tolerances) for efficient and responsible production practices for the Colorado Horticulture Green Industry and the horticulture industry as a whole.