If gardening is important in your life, flower and garden shows should be on your calendar. Garden shows entertain, educate and inspire gardeners and homeowners. They whet our gardening appetites and tantalize us with new plants and products.
The shows also offer access to an amazing pool of knowledge. Professionals and specialists are available to answer your questions and consider your problems. These people, who work in garden centers, nurseries and landscape firms, won’t have that kind of time once gardening weather arrives.
Last weekend, 12,000 people attended Plantasia at the Hamburg Fairgrounds, and many others went to GardenScape in Rochester. Here is some feedback from those shows and the Philadelphia show, which I attended:
GardenScape in Rochester: This show (March 15-18) had a few twists: a Wegmans Tasting Garden, early-bird tours for $25 at 7 a.m. (guided by Master Gardeners) and programs on its Main Stage.
Crowds loved the daily “Designers’ Challenge,” in which three designers drew plans for challenging landscapes. It was an impressive glimpse into the skills and visions of landscape designers and how differently each one looks at the same problem. Audiences also flocked to floral design demonstrations.
GardenScape had more than 100 vendors (nearly all specifically garden/ landscape-themed) and interesting landscape displays, most notably from the Rochester Parks Department and Twin Oaks Landscape with Oriental Garden Supply.
In its 21st year, the show is produced by the GardenScape Professionals Association.
Plantasia, WNY’s Flower and Landscape Show: I am a member of the WNY Nursery Landscape Association and am associated with many of the vendors,
individuals and designers. But I can still share some comparisons and observations.
The show has been held for 11 years, in Hamburg since 2004. This year it featured 175 vendors and 15,000 square feet of gardens or landscapes.
This season the strongest features of the show, from my viewpoint, were the landscape and garden displays — far surpassing prior efforts. While I understand that part of a landscaper’s living comes from “hardscape” sales (walks, walls, pergolas, water features and entertainment areas), in some years the show featured more rocks and pavers than plants.
But no more. Every display showed well chosen flowering shrubs, trees, perennials (even roses) and annuals — the latter grown by McKinley High School students. What a joy to see flowering redbuds, Chionanthus (Fringe tree), serviceberries, rhododendrons and Japanese pieris, among the bulbs and other flowers.
I hope that viewers know that many plants in the show, seen blooming together, will never see each other’s flowering face in a real garden. The plants are “forced” for these shows — induced to flower prematurely.
The landscape or garden displays are created by 14 companies: Adams Nurseries, Beyond the Basics, Chevalier Outdoor Living, the Cutting Edge Complete Landscaping, Degroff Outdoor Structures, Landscape-Tec, Menne Nursery and Garden Artistry, A Growing Business, Dore Landscape Associates, The English Gardeners, Innovative Landscapes, McKinley Continuing Education, Murray Brothers Nurseries and Restorff’s Landscape Service.
The Philadelphia Flower Show: The grand dame of them all, the Philly show is the oldest in the country and the largest indoor flower show in the world. All gardeners should see it sometime.
The Pennsylvania Horticulture Society runs it, with deep roots and great wealth behind it, and a lot of the show is about garden club competitions and floral demos. One tours vast aisles showing large container designs, front door scenes, miniature art made from flower parts, jewelry made from plants, and judged demos of houseplants, tropicals, succulents and terrariums, as well as perennials. It’s a flower show first, with an enormous, wonderful (exhausting) vendor area where you can find every possible kind of container, garden art, tool or product, plus garden-themed jewelry and clothing.
The display gardens are built around a theme each year (Italy, April in Paris, Hawaii) and are avant-garde, creative, whimsical and huge, sparking our imaginations. The entrance usually makes visitors gasp.
But this year I didn’t gasp so much. Honestly, I enjoyed Plantasia first and Rochester second, more than Philadelphia. The Hawaii theme in Philly made for spectacular mountains of orchids and lush tropical scenes — a volcano and giant waterwall with light show no less. But except for limited native plants and woodland displays, there were few garden visions, landscapes or yard and patio scenes that a Northeast gardener could apply back home.
Plantasia was lush with residential scale landscapes, gardens and outdoor living areas one could photograph and decide, “We could do that, Honey!”
In your lifetime, be sure to see the Philadelphia Flower Show or other huge shows in this country or England (an entirely other dimension). But every year, see our own shows where the take-home inspiration is useful and the learning is terrific.
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Sally Cunningham is a garden writer, lecturer and consultant.
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