In Philadelphia: A Flower Show

By Gregory Jaynes

In the time of the year when it feels as though spring is a snail, unhurried, tardy, five stops out of town and stalled on the track, a substantial number of the citizenry can be found impatiently poring over seed catalogs. Nurserymen understand this, and have long since calculated that the darker the day, the more riotous the color of their offerings, the bigger the sale. But it was not until some years ago that flower shows began to move out ahead of the gardening season, nosing their exhibition dates ever closer to the shank of winter. Improvements on the technique of "forcing," or confusing plants into forgetting the clock, hastened the shift in opening dates. Now it is standard procedure to mount a floral production in the cold. It is also smart marketing.

"Easter is too fickle for business," Robert Montgomery was saying one morning earlier this year on the floor of the venerable Philadelphia Flower Show. In years gone by, Montgomery explained, Easter struck the public as the proper time to plant, or at least to start thinking about it, and the nurseries went along. Easter proved a vexing starting gun for the nurserymen though -- people like Montgomery -- and it is easy to see why: one year Easter appears in March; another, it slips across the border into April. How, then, do you kick off a seasonal trade when the calendar plays so freely with ribbon-cutting day? You coax the public perception of spring forward, "force" it, as you would a daffodil.

"You'd be a fool not to be in this show," said Montgomery, of Robert W. Montgomery Landscape Nursery, Chester Springs, Pa. "If your advertising budget is just 5%, it should all go into the Philadelphia Flower Show. It's the ringing of the bell in the Philadelphia market. It says spring is here. And it's a fixed date." It was the second week in March.

And 240,000 people came to smell the roses. Montgomery, whose 13-acre concern has a $4.6 million annual billing, said $900,000 of it comes from contacts made at the flower show. He was one of 53 major exhibitors. Their flora took up six acres under the roof of the Philadelphia Civic Center. Montgomery is as good as anyone at giving a primer on the mercantile side of the matter:

"I started 13 years ago. My education was in marketing. I worked in nurseries in high school and college, but I didn't think there was any money in it. That has changed. Nurseries are no longer just horticultural outlets. We have a patio shop, a Christmas shop, a florist, crafts, a do-it-yourself shop. This generation now, such better buyers! We have a diagnostic service with two horticulturists, a do-it-yourself design shop. After the war and Victory gardens, horticulture died, as far as I'm concerned. Then the back-to- the-landers brought vegetable gardening back in the 1960s. It took the mystery out of it. Light. Heat. Sun. The right spot. All you need. People got involved. Houseplants took off in the '70s. In the '80s, the focus moved outdoors. We sell it as landscaping, an investment that grows."

There may be no better market for plants in the country than Philadelphia, nor any town that takes them more seriously. The Philadelphia Flower Show dates back to 1829. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the present sponsor, says there are 130 garden clubs just around Philadelphia. Two hundred years ago this summer, the nation's best and brightest undertook long, slow journeys here to write the Constitution -- and to appreciate and collect plants, shrubs and trees. Washington did it. Madison did it. Hamilton did it. Franklin, his gouty foot levitated, didn't need to; he lived here. These men were aware, as many Philadelphians are today, that horticulture is a high calling for the civilized. After all, nearly 200 years before the founding fathers gathered, Francis Bacon had written, "God Almighty first planted a garden. And, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest & refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handyworks."

Listen to three judges, two women and a man, work over a floral arrangement of lilies, roses, azaleas, cherry blossoms, begonias and viburnums, submitted by a garden club:

"It desperately needs something at the back."

"The vase is so heavy, out of proportion."

"The triangular is well handled, though."

"It's more like the French rococo than, say, the opulence of the Flemish."

"It does seem sparse looking from the front."

"It's a little too random. Your eye stops here and there. That bothers me."

"The color relationship, and particularly the magenta, is too random."

"It lacks depth, very definitely."

"Particularly in the lower areas."

"Couldn't we say something just a little bit nice?"

"The triangular pattern is effective."

"Could we say dazzlingly effective?"

"That's, uh, overstating."

"Well, of course, we can't lie."

Their posted citation: "The triangular pattern well handled; colors lively. Color relationships and placement, particularly magenta, too random for rhythm. The full-bodied, brown container out of proportion. Too heavy. Does not blend in strongly colorwise."

For all the caviling, it was a grand show, with waterwheels and hillsides, a ballroom, gazebos, a loggia, a hot-air balloon, a forest of pines and willows, a replica of a garden Washington took tea in in 1787, and a world of tulips, foxgloves, hollyhocks, primroses, mountain laurels, dogwoods, rhododendrons, sweet Williams, larkspurs, forget-me-nots, sod and sawdust. Asked how the show compared with or against the famous Chelsea Flower Show, Rosemary Verey, the English gardening writer, said quite properly, "Why, it doesn't rank with or against. That's rather like asking which one of my children I like best."

Verey had contributed a knot garden of 30 herbs to Charlie Gale's "British Heritage," an example of a classical garden. Gale, of Gale Nurseries, Gwynedd, Pa., offered that the show was "p.r., a morale booster and a big ego trip for us. My son and I are landscape architects -- Charlie and Chuck, we're known as. We spend $40,000 a year on this. My father was an estate gardener, so we're three generations. For myself, I'm a registered landscape architect, but I like to be called a gardener. Why? It's a talent. Every once in a while someone will say, 'Oh, you're a gardener,' and I'm kind of flattered."

Gale graciously offered a tour of his exhibit, as well as a lengthy, meticulously detailed explanation of how to force plants, before settling on one of his passions: "Our delphiniums, nobody can touch. It's a Pacific hybrid delphinium that goes six, seven feet. What is the secret? Ha, ha! Well, without exposing the whole damn thing, we grow three crops of seedlings, and we selectively take the better ones."

"It is an extraordinary amount of work for one week," said Verey, "and then it just vanishes into thin air."

For his efforts, Gale got a grade of 92 out of a possible 100. His was adjudged a "true garden-show presentation," but the "interior of the loggia is a little cold." As for Montgomery, that old marketeer, he got an 87: "This garden is very exuberant . . . the colors are somewhat uncontrolled. The stonework along the pool seems a little artificial and might be softened with plants."

Criticisms of some of the others ran deeper. "The intent is commendable but overly ambitious." "For a professionally executed design, labeling is amateurish."

An official said the big exhibitors complain when they are showered with compliments, saying they know what they are doing right and they need to know what they are doing wrong. Criticize them, though, and they feel cut to the quick -- rather, it struck a visitor, as if they had written War and Peace, only to be told the piece would be more effective without those silver birches. Seriously.