Flower Show
Philadelphia PA
2014

When the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) hosted its first flower show in 1829, collecting and propagating plants had become a popular pastime in the United States. It was the age of scientific discovery, and a new class of amateur botanist and home gardener was eager to display recent finds. Wearing formal attire, the society’s 80 or so members crowded into a small hall on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. The star of the proceedings was a little-known Mexican import named poinsettia.

Tomorrow, 185 years later, approximately 300,000 people will visit the 2014 Philadelphia Flower Show, held from March 1 to 9 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Along with acres of plants, there will be horticultural lectures and symposia, a performance by a vertical dance troupe, and garden-themed yoga classes. Judges will survey over 15,000 plants entered into numerous competition categories, and garden clubs from across the country will compete in on-site contests, such as table setting, window box, and miniatures design.

The theme of this year’s show is “ARTiculture,” and 18 museums and art institutions have paired with floral and landscape designers to create displays that reflect either an artist’s work or a museum’s collection. For its partnership with Storm King, for example, the Philadelphia floral design firm MODA botanica created miniature botanical versions of the upstate New York sculpture park’s huge outdoor installations. “Art and botany have always been interwoven,” says PHS president Drew Becher. “From the beginning of time, people have decorated gardens with sculptures and turned plants into art with espalier and other techniques. Our intention was to host a great mashup of the garden and museum worlds to show how that relationship is manifested right now.”

Botany has also long been interwoven with many things besides just art—fabric and interior design, to name two—so along with flower and art lovers, you’re sure to see designers of all types looking for inspiration among the blooms.

Syringa is a genus of 12 currently recognized species of flowering woody plants in the olive family or Oleaceae called lilacs. These lilacs are native to woodland and scrub from southeastern Europe to eastern Asia, and widely and commonly cultivated in temperate areas elsewhere.

Lilacs are among the most carefree spring-flowering shrubs and provide a sweet, haunting fragrance, too!

The common lilac, Syringa vulgaris, is well-loved for its toughness, reliability, and fragrance. In fact, lilacs are so tough that they can grow for 100+ years, often outliving the homes they were planted around.

This deciduous multi-stemmed shrub (or small tree) has about 10 canes and produces flowers at eye-level. The common lilac grows between 8 and 12 feet tall, depending on the variety. The fragrant flowers are good for cutting and attractive to butterflies.

While the blooms are usually lilac/purple in color (from very pale to very dark), there are also lilac varieties in white and cream and even pink and yellow. Individual flowers can be single or double.

Lilacs supposedly symbolize the joy of youth.