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March 10, 2005
Philadelphia Flower Show
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If you are into gardens and live in New York and it is still winter, the Philadelphia Flower Show would seem to be an obvious destination: spring flowers, show gardens and a real taste of the coming season. But the show has less to do with gardening than with display and shopping--more than one-third of the 33-acre Pennsylvania Convention Center site is devoted to vendors' booths, with everything from deer fencing to garden tchotchkes (lots of those) for sale.
The main displays are "Alice though the Looking Glass" extravaganzas of horticultural showmanship, which are elaborate floral exhibits--our favorite "A Motorcycle Wedding" featured a flower-lined blacktop "road" as the aisle, terminating in an altar with two motorcycles in front. The Best In Show was a huge display titled "Artist's Pallete," featuring a pond in the shape of a painter's pallete,
surrounded by banks of flowers and trees. Islands of colored roses mimicked paint on the pallet…it’s not actually beautiful, but it does leave you open-mouthed
The landscape displays are equally elaborate. The Best In Show is a landscape created entirely of different kinds of willow, including a very sweet willow pavilion. The most popular landscape is Bartlett Tree's installation of several treehouses in a woodland setting. You might have to suspend belief as you admire the exhibits. In the "What's wrong with this picture?" category, in one spring scene the blooms of the redbud match those of the astilbe perfectly...
We enjoyed the hobby exhibits and competitions most. There is flower-arranging, window-box arranging, etc. One of the categories is for pictures made entirely from flower parts, mostly petals. They are all ingenious, and some are exquisite. The other category we loved, and the second most popular venue in the show after the treehouse exhibit, is the dioramas. These are miniature landscapes that have the appeal of the most meticulously constructed dollhouses. Best in Show for this category is titled "Love thy neighbor." It is a replica of two row houses, one meticulously kept up with a perfect front lawn and blooming window boxes, its neighbor is a wreck, with a motorcycle parked on the scruffy front lawn. The whole scene, complete with real plants, is no more than 12"high.
If you go and you are not in a hurry you can save $70 dollars off the Amtrak fair (that's right seventy) by using NJ Transit and Septa. The combined ticket is about $29 but it takes two and a half hours to get there. Regular Amtrak takes an hour and a half and costs $100. The high speed Acela express is $197, the price of a cut-rate ticket to Europe!
The Philadelphia Flower show runs from March 6 to March 13.
Posted by gardenguidenyc at March 10, 2005 06:29 PM