I do enjoy an occasional flower show. The ones I attend, either in Boston or in Portland, ME, provide me with a shot of green and growing during a time of year when I know I've got about another month to 6 weeks of winter followed by about two weeks of mud season. I don't go every year, but I do enjoy them when I attend. Perhaps it's the particular shows I attend, but often the display "gardens" are actually realistic gardens, with a particular time of year emphasized, often spring. I've learned about particular plants that I haven't seen elsewhere. For instance I have Rhododendron viscosum, swamp azalea, in my garden because its scent drew me to a set of them at a long ago Boston Flower and Garden show. I guess I look at them as a form of spectacle as opposed to being literal gardens. From Boston Flower & Garden Show 2013 From Boston Flower & Garden Show 2013 The other places I go to get some green during the winter is any of several commercial or educational greenhouses that are relatively local to me. I also really enjoy visiting real gardens on open garden days, as well as public gardens when I travel. Seeing how others have used the space on garden tours and what plants they have combined is such a personal aspect of gardening.

Yes, I make the hoop as large as I feel like I can get away with. On my shelves, that's not really very big at all. But at least I can keep wrapping them around and around. The tricky part is wrapping it without clipping any growing tips downward. Sometimes I just wait until the vine's long enough, sometimes I don't wrap all the way around and rewrap it later. Having a few that I started on a smaller hoop, untangling the whole mess while trying not to break any vines, and retraining them to a larger hoop, I feel like my life is improved by minimizing that as much as possible :) Kelly, I took a picture of the topiary Thinker as well! But I particularly love how you caught that lady mid-laugh, on the right side of the pic. I missed Stonehenge and the cow sculpture. And I didn't get close enough to the peacock to see that it had those eyelashes! Too many people were taking pictures of it or with it. I felt lucky just to get a couple pics at all. It's interesting how different pics look with and without flash. I don't tend to use it at all. Makes for the occasional blurry pic but I prefer not to use it. With flash though, you can see all the little details of that bee (I think it's a bee?) Oh, I love sarracenia flowers. I have some pics of those too. Hey, where's your obovata pic? :) I wanted to see if you got a different angle on it. I only took the one photo.

Molie: thanks for posting those pictures, becaiuse now I'll have some reference points: Sorry to disappoint you folks, but here's the simple answer to the question I posed in this post : "The Philadelphia Flower Show - Where Is It Headed?" "Down The Tubes". . . Rather than just a snarky observation, let me be more specific: look at the first photo of Molie's photos in the reply just above. This was the MASSIVE structure that confronted you at the entrance: three giant picture frames ("ARTiculture", get it?) interspersed with GIANT mobiles (made of plant material, but not noticeably so) which were meant to resemble the work of Alexander Calder - who must have been thrashing in his grave. Given that there are so many of the REAL Calder sculptures and mobiles in the Philadelphia area, why the need for tacky imitations? It gets worse: the frames and mobiles are awash in ever-changing colored lights, (rather like a rock show) which renders the original colors of the mobiles pointless; every hour-on-the-hour, raucous music blares through the space (It was deafening, and you could not escape it) as four aerialists descend, suspended on cables from the rafters, and proceeded to twist and pose next to the mobiles - "living" mobiles, I guess? At most shows in the past that I've attended, people cluster around the entry exhibit and marvel at it . . . in this instance, most folks were moving away as quickly as possible. To be fair, some exhibitors really took the theme - ARTiculture - to heart, and there were a few, a VERY few, successful attempts at mirroring art through display; one of my favorite bulb purveyors, Jacques Armand, a 23-year veteran, captured Mondrian's style perfectly with crisp, single-colored squares and rectangles of flowering bulbs, laid out in a huge rectangle of grass. The huge farm-and-forest landscape by Stoney Bank Nurseries showed you living models of so many of the Wyeth family's paintings. . .it was mesmerizing, and wisely co-sponsered by the Brandywine Museum, where so many of their paintings reside, outside Philadelphia. But these were the exceptions: everywhere else it was flash-and-glam. . .I find it hard to believe that people will actually pay good money for some of garish, over-the-top stuff that so many of these "event planners" and fancy florists put out (they outnumbered the nursery exhibits for the first time ever!) The layout was a nightmare - gone were the cleverly designed pathways that guided you along from one aisle of displays to the next - now, it was a disorganized jumble. a logical path abruptly ends and you're forced left or right, or around a sudden obstacle. We found ourselves missing things and having to constantly back- track. Some of the competitive judging has been lifted out of it's longtime, logical home in the central Horticourt (where ALL the judged material used to reside) and scattered amongst the displays in the main hall. It took my friend and I a few hours to realize WHY all the disarray and confusion - they were trying to hide the fact that there was so much LESS there than usual. Our guess was about 25% fewer exhibitors than normal. . . and the other way they filled unused space: this year, for the first time, we had not one, not two, but THREE cars on the display floor! And the completely re-designed Market Place had so much more space. . . because they had expanded it onto the main floor so that it now fills nearly 50% of the entire show! And the long-sacred rule that only products relating to horticulture could be sold - GONE! - you could find all manner of gadgets, gizmos, cooking utensils, insurance, automobiles, alongside fewer than usual plant people and garden supplies. Our favorite seed shop, carrying a dozen of the best, and most unique seed companies - GONE, a piece of history. And the garden bookshop, a perennial favorite - gone, gone, gone. . . And where they subtly slipped in just two of them a couple of years ago, there are now 6 - SIX, count 'em - stand-up bars for beer and mixed drinks. To cap off my day, two friends arrived about 5:00pm to catch the last four hours of the show; they're a young couple, eager to see the show I've talked about so much over the years (and I'm helping them create the gardens at their new home) . . . we met up, I gave them a map of the show with a few exhibits circled which I hoped might give them ideas for their new garden, and my friend and I left them to it. My friend and I then went home 2½ hours EARLY, something we have NEVER done before! The next day, I had dinner with the young couple: they thought the show was a waste of time (Susie said she learned more and had more fun just going to nurseries with me!) and they would rather have spent the $54. admission, plus parking and the babysitter, on a good dinner out. . . I really didn't want to post this review, because it depresses me even in the re-telling. . .but, hey, things are what they are, and we just move on. If anyone's interested in books "about" the Philadelphia Flower Show in it's hey-day, I have a couple to recommend. Off to "SpringFest", the much smaller flower and garden show in northwestern New Jersey that I posted about last year. . .it, too, has been slowly changing, but it still has the "feel" of an indoor country fair, and the distinct advantage of being held in heated greenhouses. . .and we're supposed to get snow flurries the day we're going this week, which will make it seem TWICE as nice! Carl

I am the sun perennial booth chair for the cincinnati civic garden center, and have been doing this for 7 years now. We have been working hard to make the plant sale bigger and better this year. We have alot more corporate funding from Toyota who sponsored us for the first time last year. They were very pleased with the outcome and they even sold two of the cars they had on display there that were full of flowers We have herbs, natives, shade perennials, sun perennials, hostas, grasses, waterplants, annuals, hanging baskets, and all kinds of good stuff. I invite everyone to come and to note that the free admission days are Saturday April 30 from 9-3 and Sunday May 1st from 11-3. Its a great day of fun and plants and you are helping to raise funds for the Civic Garden Center too which is non profit. By all means anyone going please stop by Sun Perennials and look me up!!