What do the trial garden reports mean?

What do the numbers mean after certain varieties? Actually, what are the trial garden reports at all? Lol-Newbie alert!

Trial gardens are set up in various parts of the country ( and world, I imagine) to evaluate new dahlia seedlings' performance/ quality. The seedling has to be grown several years showing stability before being submitted to the various trial gardens for scrutiny by trained dahlia judges. I think the numbers reflect overall scores given by those judges, based on detailed dahlia judging stuff LOL. 85 and higher seems to be the magic number to get accolades. In the Puget Sound Dahlia Association booklet we get each year, there is a report of the top scoring dahlias from all Trial Gardens. Some made 90, 91 range scores last year, so there are apparently some super new varieties coming along soon.

Just what we need: more great dahlias to complicate the choosing process.

US dahlia trial gardens.
http://www.dahlia.org/index.php?page=ads-trial-gardens

Ohhh...Cool! Thank you so much.

O it says the Victoria trial garden is closed now :( The ADS will not classify a dahlia until it has been judged in a Trial Garden so all you dahlia propagators need to note your nearest trial garden ^_^

So, when you see the year of origin, we can guess the creator started several years prior propagating and testing it before submitting?

I think that would be a correct guess. Funny, looking at the dahlias at S.I. today, a beauty would catch my eye- ooh, ahh- holy craparoni, the price! New varieties for this year every time LOL. I did not order any of those.

Ooo-I wanna know which one caught your eye. I love so many of the new ones, but can't bring myself to order them, even with 30% off.

El Sol, Twilight, Stephen David, Teddy, Sassafras... they all would catch my eye and then I'd see the price and be like "owwwwwwwwwwwwww".

Yah, Teddy was cute! My eye went to Bluetiful for color, Charles Andrew for the flow-ey petals, and Diva for sheer purple-packin'-power. There's probably more, but I'll wait til the price comes down to decide if they are 'must haves.'

Was just curious to know which really stuck out to yous (yooz) guys.
Nicholas, Shockwave, Bluetiful, Diva and Deboah Renae really grabbed me. I ordered only 3 from them on the 30% sale. Only because I ordered a few more last minute tubers from a few other places. I....can't.....fight....the...urges.....to....order....more.
No more from here on out though. Scouts honor.

The thing is.....it's really hard to not try new ones over time. What if you're missing out on a really great plant that would be just perfect for one's goal/growing conditons? That's why a resource like Plantfiles is so helpful, because it's not just the vendor touting a certain product, but practical input from varied users of that product. So it's my hope that youz guys LOL will all put your experiences with various varieties in a database somewhere for future reference.

I want good cutting flowers, so a variety that puts out four flowers a season is going to fall off my "grow it" list after trying a couple years, and hopefully a better, similar replacement will come along. I really appreciate it when a seller says "blooms late" because I'm most likely going to avoid that one. DO YOU HEAR ME, FERNCLIFF ILLUSION? (I really want to have droves of that flower, but it's such a late show here, I'm afraid it's just not meant to be.) But what if someone else comes up with an equally drop-dead gorgeous white with striking purple accents that blooms in July? I would never know, unless I tried it and grew it right here.

Therein lies the 'gotta try it' rub.