There are some things in this life that are just too good to miss. One of them is the Philadelphia Flower Show. A few years ago, Flower Show week found me recovering from a bad bout of the flu. It took a major effort just to get from my bed to the bathroom and I thought I would have to miss the show. But on the last possible day, I had just enough energy to get dressed and into a friend’s car. She drove and I dozed. We made it to the show and had a good time, even though I had to rest after seeing each exhibit. It was well worth the two days I spent flat on my back afterwards.
This year I was fine but Mother Nature was indisposed. To get to the Flower Show we drove through several different incarnations of “wintery mix,” and all of it was coming down in buckets. But we persisted and the worst was over by the time we arrived at the Philadelphia city limits. Naturally, the weather inside the Philadelphia Convention Center was perfect.
This year’s theme was “Brilliant,” a salute to the British gardening tradition. With my green fingers and English family roots, I would have gone through a typhoon to get there. I was not disappointed. The 2013 Philadelphia Flower Show was the best in years.
The show entrance is always a monumental set-piece. In keeping with the theme, this year’s entrance was a giant, plant bedecked version of a set of palace gates. The gates stood in front of an allée of birch trees that reminded me of the church décor at the most recent royal wedding. The birch allée led to an immense representation of Big Ben, which was a hybrid of horticulture, on-site engineering and image projection technology. It was all very dramatic, though the roses that adorned the palace gates were too distant to observe closely.
The show horses of the Philadelphia Flower Show are the big display gardens, which invoke the theme through plant choices and overall design. Needless to say, the Convention Center was full of boxwood, foxgloves, delphiniums and other romantic garden plants. Roses were in evidence, but not in the profusion you might expect in a show devoted to the English tradition.
The best of the big display gardens was “Hidcote Holiday,” sponsored by a large nursery, Stoney Bank Nurseries of Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. It was an homage to Hidcote Manor, in Gloucestershire, home during the first part of the twentieth century, to an American, Major Laurence Johnston, and now owned by England’s National Trust.
Hidcote was the archetypal Arts and Crafts garden, embodying much of what most people now recognize as the “English garden style.” The designers of the Philadelphia Flower Show exhibit invoked the setting by backing the long exhibit space with a large scrim depicting the manor house. The display garden was a double herbaceous border with a grass path in the middle and a wrought iron gate at the entrance. The entrance area was also notable for a lovely specimen of Corylis contorta, a shrub with amazingly twisted branches that is known to many people as “Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick.”
Visitors couldn’t walk through the Hidcote exhibit, but could peer at it through the various “windows” in the planting scheme. The mixed shrub, perennial and annual borders were lush and beautiful. No one flower or plant type stood out, but all combined to make a glorious whole.
Though “Hidcote Holiday” stole the show, all the show gardens—large and small—were exceptionally beautiful. Creative wrought iron works, especially gates, were prominently displayed. Unlike in years past, when various themes provoked a lot of unrestrained horticultural and artistic excess, creativity and restraint triumphed over garishness. It was refreshing. We home gardeners—even those of us without manor houses, English cottages or romantic potting sheds—could find plenty of ideas to translate to our own gardens.
I was also impressed with the show of prize-winning amateur-grown specimen plants. The display area for these graphic examples of horticultural virtuosity was better organized, better lit and more visitor friendly than ever before. The changes made the lush clivia, enormous succulents and robust daffodils look even better. Based on that large dose of inspiration, I will be motivated to fertilize my houseplants faithfully for at least the next two months.
I always try to restrain myself in the vendor’s area, which is large and full of tempting plants and gardenalia. I went on a slight bender at the African violet stand, but figured I could eventually amortize the cost by propagating the violets by leaf cuttings and giving the offspring away as Christmas gifts. It is that kind of long term rationalization that guarantees that I will have absolutely nothing to retire on.
But retirement is a ways off and the Philadelphia Flower Show is now. I have a acquired a few new plants and a rosy spring glow. The whole experience was “brilliant.”