Blossoms beckon visitors
Visitors arriving at the Philadelphia Flower Show this year will feel as if they’re stepping into the endless flower fields of Holland.
A rainbow sea of 30,000 tulips and other blooms will stretch seemingly into the horizon as a canopy of 6,000 cut and dried flowers floats overhead. Bridges covered in Delft tiles, illuminated windmills and splashing canals will welcome them through the undulating gardens.
The festival runs March 11 through March 19 and is billed as the largest event of its kind in the U.S.
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s show this year, Holland: Flowering the World, celebrates the beauty of the Dutch landscape and the ingenuity of the country’s green technologies. But what’s hidden among the swaths of tulips, daffodils and hyacinths is the backstory of the blooms, which started their journey to the flower show last summer at a quaint farm and garden centre nestled in the rolling hills just outside the city.
Meadowbrook Farm, in suburban Jenkintown, is operated by the horticultural society and supplies flowers and plants for many of the show’s 50 major exhibitors.
Customers contact the farm each summer with ideas for their show displays and their plant wish-lists. Then workers go about raising the plants and “forcing” the flowers.
Plants need a certain amount of exposure to cold temperatures to flower, but also enough days of warmth and the proper amount of light, and those amounts vary from plant to plant.
So plants are put in a 3C cooler to make them feel like it’s winter, then transferred to the 20C greenhouse, deluded into thinking it’s spring and time to shine.
“It’s an art and a science,” said Nathan Roehrich, the garden’s head grower. “There are so many variables. It’s all about knowing your plants.”
Floral and landscape exhibits in the hall focus on aspects of Dutch life: One is an ode to Amsterdam’s Red Light District; another highlights the city’s innovative bikeshare program that has spread to cities throughout the world.
The show explores Dutch innovation in green technologies, starting with the nation’s windmills. A main highlight will be the Ecodome, making its first travels outside the Netherlands. The geodesic dome showcases sustainability practices in the Netherlands. It features moss water storage, an insect “hotel,” living walls, fruit trees, climbing plants and edible plants. The Associated Press