Not just great garden flowers. There’s a lot of older show flowers that been superseded by newer cultivars but they’re lovely in their own right. For example, Empress of Ireland is a favorite of mine but it’s not a good garden flower. (I have to keep it in a clean sandy raised bed.) It was origianlly a valued show flower but has been edged out of its class by newer whites. I don’t enter it myself, evn though I have a lot of it, nor have I noticed it entered in the few years I’ve been going to shows. It’s a sweetly beautiful flower and is certainly historically significant if not “historic.” A Classics class (or Masters? like the Masters athletic program for aging athletes) would give me more of an excuse to keep it in a pampered show bed rather than kicking it out into the killing ground.
Kathleen