Field report from Philadelphia International Flower Show 2012

Each year there is a massive flower and gardening show in Philadelphia, a giant pompous event on par with the Chelsea Show in England.  This year I went with neighbor and friend JL, and we had a blast.  The theme was Hawaii, which means that they invite garden designers to design and mount exhibits with flowers, structures, and other gardening features on this theme.  You would think Hawaii wouldn't be that hard - just think lava, lava, silverswords, rainforest, pineapple plantations, ocean, and some more lava.



Unfortunately, it seems like most designers never had been to Hawaii, nor looked up some basic facts. I don't have any good photos from the "Hawaiian" exhibits because I had set the ISO on my camera wrong, but if I had to categorize these ca 10 different garden designs I would say:  stuff a square on the floor with palms, anthuriums, orchids, all in a variety of chaotic colors, and maybe have a little lagoon, sand, and a surfboard - always a surfboard.  The native Hawaiian species were absent.  Lava, who cares about that!?  Not hint of volcanism.  And the exhibits all looked the same.  Stuffed full with the same artifical-looking tropical plants from any tropical island, nothing Hawaiian specific at all.

It really was rather painful, I think. I like the tropics, but I like people to design from real things and real plants, not pick things out from a hotel planting in any tropical country.  But then, the designers care very little about botany, history, geology, soils, and what can actually grow together for real.  They just stuff things together in some artificial design, in a unnatural and I would say, messy and illogical chaos.



This was pretty cool though - put an upside down Tillandsia on a stick, glue a sand dollar (sea urchin shell) on top, and wow, you have a jellyfish in your coral reef plant design.



This was the only exhibit we saw that actually built on the lava theme.  A patio dinner table set for dinner, and then the lava comes and disturbs the scene.  I wonder how the lava was made, it was very real-looking, it was even glowing with red lights.



At the show are also many other exhibits and exhibitors, some of which where really great. People compete over the best dinner centerpiece arrangement, best bonsai, largest flowering cactus, nicest tiniest flower design, and so on.

 
I bet 90% of the contestants are women.  The Asian women rule the pressed plant art exhibits, and their artwork is amazing.


In some cases the organizers tell the contestants to make a flower design containing specific things. These two were under the category "bamboo, cheap ugly glitterish stuff from Michaels, and then throw some orchids on it". It was horrendous. Generally it was far too much orchids and anthuriums. Come on, was there a sale on these? There are tens of thousands of tropical flowers, why just pick what is popular? One exhibit got an award for having 'the best design with rare and unusual plants', but I didn't see any rare and unusual plants in it! Strange... maybe anything but palms, orchids, and anthuriums is considered rare by non-botanical horticulturalists? (OK, I know I am critical here, but come on! There are a quarter million plant species out there. And design is supposed to have a thought, a theme, a line, a pattern, not just be mish-mash of the plants you expect to see in front of a Caribbean hotel).


This was fantastic on the other hand. A simplified model of central Philadelphia, from the art museum to Center City, with xerophytic succulents as the model plants. Wonderful, and done by the Philadelphia Parks department. Innovative, beautiful and educational, all at the same time. 5 stars!



The tropical wedding dinner table was a bit too much, and a bit too yellow in its filtered yellow spotlight, but still interesting. There wasn't much space to actually sit, eat, and talk, but who cares. And they covered the cycad stems with tubes of red flowers - cool, but why?


One of the things that bothers me most is how artificial all the designed gardens look like. For example, here the plants are spaced far too evenly, like if they were measured out with gauge blocks ('måttsats' in Swedish, which is a Swedish invention from my hometown!), and not just grown there for a while. It is nearly like having a Lego garden - the plants can only sit on the Lego knobs, not in between. It gives you this feeling of it not being real, not being alive, not being natural. One exception was a garden with spring bulbs, which was gorgeous, and there they had also used dried old oak leaves as mulch, not the regular ugly cedar mulch that was in most exhibits.



Lots of funny and nice things were for sale. Morel pottery. Seeds in packets designed by local artists. Weeds dried and sold as fancy flowers. Pottery vases from Maine.



Lots of very ugly, tacky, and cheap-looking (but not cheap) things were for sale. Metal palm lamps that looked like they belonged in some NJ mafioso home on the sea shore. Oils lamps with silk and plastic flowers made from oil-based plastic. Here you dig up oil from the Earth to make flowers with the Earth while it is full of living flowers? And glass fountains that would break if a bluejay was just looking at it, I bet.





In case you didn't know it, the sponge holder is the latest thing to have! You might think I spent the day being upset and disgusted, but not at all. It was a great show, a great trip, I just feel I don't really relate to some of the things the garden designers and horticulturalists do. I know, I am 'miljöskadad' as we say in Sweden, i.e., damaged by my career choice and education... :)

(And here is a link to all photos at the Flower Show 2012 - there was much more to look at)

A visit to Longwood gardens

A few weeks ago we had reason to drive to the other side of Philadelphia, about 2 hours away, to pick up a great machine we bought, a Gravely mini-tractor! The pick up place was only 10 min from Longwood Gardens, one of the most famous gardens in the US, so of course we had to stop and visit.  I have been there several times, but each time is a little different.  It was an overcast day, and pretty hot, but still a real garden experience.  Here are some impressions, and click on the photos for larger versions on Flickr.


This just doesn't do it for me.  Totally artificial, and all about having controlling power over nature and shape it into unnatural forms. Topiary craziness, indeed.


Bonsais, like this pomegranate, are also about power over nature, but somehow this is more based on nature's own circumstances.  The plants will simply die if you don't take care of them at all, and the plants are meant to look natural, even if in smaller, dwarfish shapes.


The palm house with cycads and Monstera's is always such a lush and overwhelming place.


I love the water lily ponds.  Even if they add black dye to the water to get better reflections.


From inside the greenhouse, between one of the greenhouse rooms and a music room.  I liked the contrast between the soft fabric and the climbing plant.


Nice reflections in the sunken tree fern greenhouse, with pink plumerias.

In the tree house you can listened to the sound of the forest. We didn't hear anything.  It is not only light pollution at night around here, but also sound pollution in the daytime.


Green, green, green forest. Nice.

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From the Du Pont Mansion's exhibit: Just like this figure caption, my mother also told us to differentiate between 'clean dirt' and 'dirty dirt'.  The clean stuff was, for example, if you dropped your sandwich in the forest and it was down for a few seconds, then you could pick it up, blow the pine needles off, and then continue eating it.  Dirty dirt was somehow more related to humans and other animals.


Too perfect landscaping is boring and stressful.  It is like a painting with geometric shapes, not how living things really want to be. Again, all about control.  this kind of landscaping is like painting with plants, forcing them into your own design, without any respect to them and what they can and will do. And not a weed, as far as yo can see.

a blast from the past

38A: Alethopterius serlii (seed fern) [Pennsylvanian, 300 mya, upper Carboniferous], originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

While we ponder the future, it might be interesting to ponder the past as well. This seed fern fossil from Pennsylvania is over 300 million years old. It is pretty amazing that you can see and touch something that old I think. If you look close you can even see the veins in the leaves. The seed ferns are all extinct now, and was a separate lineage leading up to the seed plants.

I don't think we even can imagine 1 million years, really. When we talk and plan for the future we think 10-20 (maybe 50) years ahead, not 1000 years, not 10 000 years. And here is this leaf that is 300 000 000 years old. It puts things in perspective, I think, but we often forget about the timescale of things. 

Checking out Bucks County Art, part 1

The weekend before last, AREA and I participated in Elephant's Eye, a great little event put on by artists in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.  You get a map, some directions and information, and then it is up to you to find the home studios of the sculptures, painters, and other artists that are part of this.  We spent 5 hours driving around in this rural, but rather upscale, part of Pennsylvania, across the Delaware River from Lambertville, NJ, and saw some really great art, some really interesting art, and some that didn't move me much.  Just like art should be.  Here is our story (part 1).

 

The first artist and studio we visited was Alex Cohen at King Oaks Farm in Newton.  This turned out to be the highlight of all the studio visits, not only because of the art, but also because Alex is funny, interesting, and likes to talk.

His studio (and apartment) is in the old carriage house (photo above) of this big estate which was owned by his grandparents.  They used to cut a meadow into a landing strip for planes in the early 1900s, and some of Alex' art is inspired by this.  What I really loved about his art was the diversity in the paintings, and they were happy (or less so, but not just depressing), interesting, alive, and varied in method, colors, and themes.  Some looked like colored-in black and white movie scenes from 1940s gangster flicks, others were more abstract and showed swaths of green in a spring forest.  Wonderful versatility, and lots of art.  Some of the studios we visited later had much less art and things around, and were therefore less interesting.  And many of the older artists seemed to have gotten stuck in a rut and only did one particular thing.  I won't mention their names here, because this is just a personal opinion, and others might love their work.

After a while, we got hungry. AREAs comment to this was: "Mom, you always know where the good places are, can't you take me to some little inn or something?". Well, I was in uncharted territory.  We drove and looked, drove and looked, but nothing looked good (just fast food or junk food or greasy pizza). Eventually we came to Gardenville, a tiny crossroads with a few houses with a sense of times past (the post office address is Pipersville).  A general store served sandwiches and we went in to ask if there was a place around that served sit-down food.
"Yes, you can sit outside at the garden tables," the young clerk said.
"No, like a place that serves warm food," I clarified.
"Oh, I guess the bar is open across the street," she said, "it is after noon.  Yep, it is open!"

We looked across the street, catty-corner to the general store was the Gardenville Hotel and Bar, of obvious ancient prestige (and I mean ancient here).  We weren't really sure about the whole bar-thing, but it said Dining Room on the sign too, so we crossed the street between giant GMC trucks and horse trailers.

 

We went inside, and after the dark hallway with wallpaper anno 1924 or so, came into a very dark dining room of similar decor.

 

Tiffany-lookalike lamps in the ceiling, metal chairs with red 'galon' (the kind that sticks to your skin through your pants on a hot summer evening), and an unmistakable smell.

"This smells like a hotel in Uzbekistan", I told AREA.  That musky, moldy, and old smell brought me back to some memorable times in the old Communist Party's summer vacation places (I wasn't making that up, it was from personal experience). Nobody was around, no waiter, no guests.  We made our way around the corner and found the bar, which actually was populated and didn't smell.  Nice waitress too, extremely nice and funny.

We sat down, by this time weak from hunger and thirst, at the table under the reindeer (they say caribou here, but they look the same).

 

A couple of regulars were sitting at the bar, one watching an old movie on the TV, and everybody was eating or ordering food.  Well, the food can't be that bad I thought, not if the regulars that know the waitress eat here.  (I don't really take photos of nice people I don't know, so the photo of the bar shows it empty)

So we ordered - grilled veggie wrap for the herbivore and Corona with lime and a Gardenville burger for me.  With SPECIAL potato salad, that all the regulars told me to get because I would love it (I did, it was fantastic). The food was really, really good, and it was not just because we were hungry.  We had happened to find a food oasis in the hybrid zone between rich people's suburbia and farming play country, and old real rural communities.  It was such a great experience.  So all of you readers on this blog, go and visit Gardenville Hotel and Bar in Gardenville, PA.  Oh, I didn't tell you, there is a real modern hotel in the back of the building, without Central Asian smells :)

The waitress told everybody a story about a man who had come in the weekend before and eaten 2 dozen oysters, 1 plate of steamed clams, one Gardenville burger, and two more big dishes. How did he fit it all?  Just the burger was giant.

OK, that was half the day - the rest will be in part 2.

(And a side note - AREA passed her drivers test and got her drivers license a few days earlier, so she drove the whole day, excellent job, kiddo!)

Report from spring: Philadelphia Flower Show 2011 (LP = Long Post)

Before I left for Costa Rica I managed to squeeze in a daytrip to the annual, international, famous, fashionable, and extravagant Philadelphia Flower Show to check out what is going on in the world of horticulture and gardening.

 These shows have three components.  Two are competitions, one are large or small installations of gardens or other plant-themed exhibits, flower arrangements, themes, and so on.  The other competition is which can grow the largest Hoya with the most green leaves, largest Christmas cactus in perfect symmetry, or smallest rock garden (and so on, in perpetuity).  I am sure they have at least 200 classes you can compete in.  Only the best plants are shown, so there must be a lot of weeding done by the judges among the submissions early on.

The last part, is a giant area with vendors selling everything that have to do with flowers - tools, seeds, knick-knacks, salad dressings, ugly garden decorations, deer fencing, super cutters, and water hose attachments. Yes, I did spend some money, mostly on seeds :)  Strange, there are really no books for sale here, which makes no sense to me.

This year's theme was Springtime in Paris, which was followed by some, but not all exhibitors.  In fact, the winner of Best in Show for major exhibits showcased a fishing cabin in a bayou in Louisiana (OK, that is kind of French, but neither spring nor Paris).  Outside it was freezing, and inside the convention center it was flowers, flowers, flowers.  And people, thousands. Here are some personal reflections on this type of living botanical art (and science).

Making a flower arrangement inspired by a dress?  No problem.

We are having a ball!

This painting is 'painted' with only pressed plants.

A touch-feel garden table for blind people - horticultural therapy in action and a wonderful thing for all.

 

And the winner is.....  this!  Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades did a great job, but it is too clean!  Make it look worn and old and more real... that would have been even more charming.  But I realize that control over dirt might be something many horticultural people love, so the cleaner the better in their minds....

These handmade glass vases were nice and are for hanging on a wall.

The 'Paris Underground' flower design contest was interesting in its macabre combination of skulls, metals, blood and flowers.  National Geographic just had an article on the catacombs under Paris, and what they do and did with all those bones....

A bit overdone and overwrought?  Nah, this is America. No wait, it is Paris, right!

Something pink for all the girls and ladies.  I have no idea what this was inspired by.  Often when I go to these shows I wish the designers used less of everything.  It often turns into a mishmash of large and colorful plants, but not particularly beautiful. Just like many American Christmas trees - more color, larger is better...

This got many ohs and ahs by the flower ladies.  I didn't like it at all (that is why I took a photo of it!). Why throw cheap junkglitterish from China onto nice flowers?  This is just like when they spraypaint little living cedar trees with glitter and sell them in the stores at Christmas.  Come on, fake is not better. (more examples, here and here). It looks so cheap, don't they get that?

Next time, bring a flower to a friend.

Now this was cool and different.  You get some junk and garbage together, some cutting tools, and a spotlight, and whips, and you have created a can-can girls out of cans. Michael Bruce had four installations and they were all fantastic and unusual. Innovative and wonderful.

This I loved and it was made by Groundswell, a company not far from where we live.  A fake tree allee, supposedly from Monet's garden, but reinterpreted as cedar trunks standing in water with blue fake waterlily leaves, red gold fishes, and dripping water from the tree branches and leaves above.  Creative and very different.  And very dark, too dark to get good photos. 

What are the daffodils doing out in the Pine Barrens when you are camping?  Did you plant them there last year and then came back to camp at the same spot just to look at some Narcissus? Even the pine needles on the old army tent were over-arranged, probably with tweezers.  Come on! Garden designers are sometimes so crazy about the colors that they put together plants based on their colors, not on where they can or should grow.  Many landscape architecture students know very little about plants, and design with 'red bush, 2 feet tall', instead of knowing the plants and their natural shapes and forms and environmental requirements.  Oh, there was a tiny pond in this sandy pineforest exhibit too, about one-two square meter, and guess what - there was a fishing rod rigged up by it.  Fish in a tiny pond like that in the pine barrens?  The pink ladies loved the whole thing - so romantic... I didn't.

La Vie en Rose - is this conceptual flower art?  This didn't do much for me, but kind of cool.

This was inspired by the movie An American in Paris. I don't know what it represents, I guess I have to watch the movie again. Skirts and legs maybe?

Superpredictable and ugly. Keep it more simple.

Now this kind of overdone coloring on the design palette I can understand, because this is supposed to be a Parisian Florist Shop.  You go here to pick out a few select colored things to bring home from a vast variety of colors, shapes, and scents.

Carousel animal made from flowers. What do you think? Any opinions?

All my show photos are here if you want to see more.