Philadelphia Flower Show - expectations and omissions

Yesterday my friend JL and I went to the Philadelphia Flower Show, this annual, glorious, giant event of artificially designed horticultural plants and gardens. This was probably my 5th visit, and I am getting used to the feel now.

The show is divided up into three parts, broadly speaking.  The first part, where you enter the show, are giant installations focused on some theme, this year it was 'Britain, Brilliant'.  Don't ask me how Britain is brilliant, I have no idea who came up with that non-brilliant slogan.  Anyway, there was a giant Big Ben clock, the gates to Kensington or Buckingham palace, things associated to London Fog, spring bulbs, royal crowns, and red and purple.



In my humble opinion, this year's theme was a total miss.  I don't think these designers even know much about Britain.  And Britain isn't just London and its vicinities.  Where were the rolling hills, the hedgerows, the fossil-rich cliffs along the English Channel, the little tiny front gardens, where were Kew Gardens and their greenhouses, where were the amazing British botanists of times past (Hooker, to name just one).  Instead it was gold, crowns, red, and some stone castles.


The throne from the War of the Roses?

The second part are smaller installations of gardens from invited groups and companies and also a large area where amateurs bring in their best and most fantastic specimens of plant cultivars, and then compete against each other in different classes.  For example: "Best cactus", "Cymbidium orchid", 'Hanging fern", or "Miniature plant". Each category is judged and they give out awards, 1st prize, 2nd prize, etc.  It is fun to see these plants, but it is just like a dog show.  People pamper their plants, brush the hairs on the cactus, and obviously treat their plants with lots of nutrients, hormones, light or darkness, to get them to behave and look their best on their big day.


The succulent winners. 


A basket case design.
In this area are also the floral arrangements and botanical art made with pressed plants.  This year all art had to do with royalty.  I wonder how school children in the Republic of the United States feel about making a royal crown out of pressed flowers for display at an American show?  Maybe I am the only one that finds this strange?  The total obsession with royalty in this republic, in this day and age? 

The Philadelphia Horticultural Society, who are the ones that arrange this show, seems to be stuck in a previous century where ladies that had nothing better to do tended their roses and potted their geraniums.  Ok, maybe that is a bit harsh, but that is a feeling I get.  Conspicuously absent from the show (except from the commercial booths) was any displays that focused on the whole home-gardening and home-growing trend that is huge in USA right now. How to grow your own veggies, how to make your own food, how to be more sustainable, how to have gardens that can manage climate stress, storms, heaps of heavy snow in the winter, invasive species, native species, wildlife habitats, and so on.


This species is classified as an invasive species.  I doubt many knew that. 

Instead there are exhibits that are empty when it comes to ideas and messages.  Many exhibits felt like (as usual) "OK, lets put something yellow over there, and some red here, and then some rocks, and then we need something whimsical and a blue light, and some funky garden chair".  Nothing really designed.  No plants that go together.  Sarracenia next to daffodils?  Give me a break!  They would NEVER survive together, nor flower at the same time.  Everything is planted in straight rows, equally distant from each other, and it is the same plants over and over. Totally unnatural.  Where are the true designers?  Where are the people that understand plants' requirements, understand that simplicity and clear lines and naturalities are better than rainbow mess of botanical chaos?  Oh, it is so depressing.  And then the old ladies say 'oh-ah', and love it, and I think - well, this would never work in real life.


Spraypainted plants, plastic fence ties, and shredded paper.  Why?  What is the idea?  What does this mean?  It just looks ugly. It looks like spraypainted plants with plastic fence ties and shredded paper strips.


The hodgepodge table.

I have this idea that artists first come up with an idea and then the thing is how you present this idea, this message to the world.  How to you communicate via your art, communicate feelings, needs, information, thoughts...  Landscapers and horticulturalists also like to see themselves as artists of living things, they design, 'paint with flower colors', create beauty.  But the message or idea in these exhibits were totally lacking.  I have no idea what they wanted to say.  Many times there were no statement or not even a sign on who had created an exhibit either.  It just turns into a giant hodgepodge (a name that was used for one exhibit, in fact, very appropriate).

And many florists and garden designers seem to think that just throwing some glitter, neon plastic, or metallic beads into something makes it instantaneously better.  It doesn't.  It makes it look cheap. It makes it look like the designer went to Michael's craft store during their sale.

One great exception to this disappointment was Bartram's garden by the students from The Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades, who always have great exhibits. They put their exhibit, about 18th century plant exchanges between England and USA, in a great historical perspective and both educated and enjoyed the viewer.  Wonderful!


The final area, in the back, are hundreds of small booths from commercial sellers of horticultural products.  From jewelry to cut flowers, deck furniture to best cutter to cut up the tree that fell in the superstorm, seed packets and bulbs, and lots of items designed with garden themes.  This area was a lot of fun, and actually, this is where the modernization is taking place. 

OK, and now over to some interesting things we saw:

Michael Michaud's Botanical Jewelry


A lamp made by puzzle-piece shaped vinyl, by Infinity Lightning.  Really cool, and comes in many colors and shapes. 


Fantastic handmade clay tiles made by pressing live plants onto the surface.  Here is a fantastically beautiful weed, a thistle. The tiles are made by Symmetry Tile Works (Epping, NH)


This was probably the most beautiful thing, a simple line of birches.  

More things we saw will come in a later blogpost on new trends in the plant world...

PS.  My husband asked me yesterday 'since you are so upset and annoyed with this show, why do you keep on going?".  Well, because there are little gems here and there, and it is good to see bad stuff so you can identify the good stuff.  And also, so I can write about it, and hope that the Philadelphia Horticultural Society at some point decide to enter real time, with real world issues, and not just live in some romantic past with princesses, perfect lawns, and rich people's gardens. There is still hope!

Would I would like to see is a theme like 'Gardening and Climate Change - Plants under the weather', or 'Urban Gardening, plants for food and soul', or at least one little installation garden that is a little bit different and unexpected.  How about a garden just in blue or white, a garden just with dead plants, a garden based on Japan, a garden that looks real and is doable, a garden for tired parents and happy kids, a garden for touching plants and smelling them (there was one like that a few years back, it was great), or simply, 'McMansion gardens for sustainability and survival' (hehe!)).

So, dear PHS members, if you read this, please do something... try to shake the dinosaur skin and pearl necklaces off your bodies and do something different.  Just inviting school kids to grow geraniums is not really doing it...  even if it is a good first step.  Oh, and invite the person that made this garden to your show.  (Wij Gardens, a must-visit)

Click on a photo to get to the photo stream with more photos. 

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)

Favorite artist: Erin Wilson, quilting queen

An artist grows in Brooklyn and her name is Erin Wilson.  We saw her work for the first time at the Philadelphia Craft Show in 2011, where her large quilts of tiny, tiny pieces of handdyed, stitched pieces of fabric caught my attention and drew me in.  I love them!  The photo above is borrowed from her website, and shows one piece of a much larger quilt.  The patterns, geometric, but also natural and slightly random invokes fantasy, imagery, and emotions in a way that no textile work ever has before for me.  Here you have architecture, geology, interior designs, sailing, machines, factories, trees, shapes, and tepees, all at once - and what one person sees is not the same as the next.  Simply wonderful!  Expensive too, so I never thought I would own any of her work. (photo above, copyright Erin Wilson)

After we came home from the Philadelphia show, my husband gave me a package and in it was, you guessed it, one of her miniquilts, a 2 x 2 block mounted neatly on a wood frame for hanging on the wall.  Here it is!  What do you see?  I love it and it is now at home in our newly renovated guestroom/office.  This is really creativity at its best.  Thank you Erin for sharing this with us.

 

And then, right after Christmas we got a little brown package in the mail.  Hmm, we thought, wonder what this is.  Erin sent us a quilted tree ornament, just like that!  What an incredibly wonderful surprise!!!  When I see this I think about the power of red love, how it cracks through hard rocks and layers. Others might see the Washington Monument at sunrise, or a rocket at the Florida seashore... the impressions and feelings and interpretations are endless.

Dear Erin, Thank You so much for sharing your work and love for fabric with us.  You are absolutely amazing! We love your work and will buy more of it, promise.  Looking at these quilts make me so happy!

 (Now, go over and visit her website and GET LOST IN COLOR AND SHAPES)

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.