There are some things in this life that are just too good to miss.\u00a0 One of them is the Philadelphia Flower Show.\u00a0 A few years ago, Flower Show week found me recovering from a bad bout of the flu.\u00a0 It took a major effort just to get from my bed to the bathroom and I thought I would have to miss the show.\u00a0 But on the last possible day, I had just enough energy to get dressed and into a friend\u2019s car.\u00a0 She drove and I dozed.\u00a0 We made it to the show and had a good time, even though I had to rest after seeing each exhibit.\u00a0 It was well worth the two days I spent flat on my back afterwards.<\/p>\n
This year I was fine but Mother Nature was indisposed.\u00a0 To get to the Flower Show we drove through several different incarnations of \u201cwintery mix,\u201d and all of it was coming down in buckets.\u00a0 But we persisted and the worst was over by the time we arrived at the Philadelphia city limits.\u00a0 Naturally, the weather inside the Philadelphia Convention Center was perfect.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s theme was \u201cBrilliant,\u201d a salute to the British gardening tradition.\u00a0 With my green fingers and English family roots, I would have gone through a typhoon to get there.\u00a0 I was not disappointed.\u00a0 The 2013 Philadelphia Flower Show was the best in years.<\/p>\n
The show entrance is always a monumental set-piece.\u00a0 In keeping with the theme, this year\u2019s entrance was a giant, plant bedecked version of a set of palace gates.\u00a0 The gates stood in front of an all\u00e9e of birch trees that reminded me of the church d\u00e9cor at the most recent royal wedding.\u00a0 The birch all\u00e9e led to an immense representation of Big Ben, which was a hybrid of horticulture, on-site engineering and image projection technology.\u00a0 It was all very dramatic, though the roses that adorned the palace gates were too distant to observe closely.<\/p>\n
The show horses of the Philadelphia Flower Show are the big display gardens, which invoke the theme through plant choices and overall design.\u00a0 Needless to say, the Convention Center was full of boxwood, foxgloves, delphiniums and other romantic garden plants.\u00a0 Roses were in evidence, but not in the profusion you might expect in a show devoted to the English tradition.<\/p>\n
The best of the big display gardens was \u201cHidcote Holiday,\u201d sponsored by a large nursery, Stoney Bank Nurseries of Glen Mills, Pennsylvania.\u00a0 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\u2019s National Trust.<\/p>\n
Hidcote was the archetypal Arts and Crafts garden, embodying much of what most people now recognize as the \u201cEnglish garden style.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The display garden was a double herbaceous border with a grass path in the middle and a wrought iron gate at the entrance.\u00a0 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 \u201cHarry Lauder\u2019s Walking Stick.\u201d<\/p>\n
Visitors couldn\u2019t walk through the Hidcote exhibit, but could peer at it through the various \u201cwindows\u201d in the planting scheme.\u00a0 The mixed shrub, perennial and annual borders were lush and beautiful.\u00a0 No one flower or plant type stood out, but all combined to make a glorious whole.<\/p>\n
Though \u201cHidcote Holiday\u201d stole the show, all the show gardens\u2014large and small\u2014were exceptionally beautiful.\u00a0 Creative wrought iron works, especially gates, were prominently displayed.\u00a0 Unlike in years past, when various themes provoked a lot of unrestrained horticultural and artistic excess, creativity and restraint triumphed over garishness.\u00a0 It was refreshing.\u00a0 We home gardeners\u2014even those of us without manor houses, English cottages or romantic potting sheds\u2014could find plenty of ideas to translate to our own gardens.<\/p>\n
I was also impressed with the show of prize-winning amateur-grown specimen plants.\u00a0 The display area for these graphic examples of horticultural virtuosity was better organized, better lit and more visitor friendly than ever before.\u00a0 The changes made the lush clivia, enormous succulents and robust daffodils look even better.\u00a0 Based on that large dose of inspiration, I will be motivated to fertilize my houseplants faithfully for at least the next two months.<\/p>\n
I always try to restrain myself in the vendor\u2019s area, which is large and full of tempting plants and gardenalia.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is that kind of long term rationalization that guarantees that I will have absolutely nothing to retire on.<\/p>\n
But retirement is a ways off and the Philadelphia Flower Show is now.\u00a0 I have a acquired a few new plants and a rosy spring glow.\u00a0 The whole experience was \u201cbrilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are some things in this life that are just too good to miss.\u00a0 One of them is the Philadelphia Flower Show.\u00a0 A few years ago, Flower Show week found me recovering from a bad bout of the flu.\u00a0 It took a major effort just to get from my bed to the bathroom and I … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2],"tags":[283],"class_list":["post-773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-spring","tag-philadelphia-flower-show"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":774,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773\/revisions\/774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}