2024 Philadelphia Flower Show Reporter’s Notebook
March 11th, 2024
The just-ended 2024 Philadelphia Flower Show was another typically wow event with its 75,000-flower main-entrance garden, billboard-sized floral map of the U.S., and floral “clouds” hanging from the ceiling.
But among the blooming glitz was a lot of fascinating plant and gardening information. Here’s a sampling that filled this reporter’s notebook.
The show’s big buzz
The U.S. Geological Survey Team (of all entities) had an eye-opening display on the importance of native bees, which are getting a lot of love lately for their pollinator services.
Did you know Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware, have 450 species of native bees, and that many of them look more like mini-houseflies than the lumbering bumblebees that most people envision when they think bee?
USGS says two of the best things gardeners can do to help dwindling populations of native bees are: 1.) replace lawn space with flowering plants (especially native species), and 2.) drill 1/8-inch to 5/8-inch holes in dead wood around the yard to encourage nesting.
For everything you’d want to know (and see) about native bees, check out USGS’s Bee Lab website.
“Speed dating” and the vanilla orchid
Vanilla is the world’s second most expensive spice for good reason. (Saffron is number one.)
Not only is the vanilla orchid vine finicky about weather, it has only a 12-hour window of pollination, and it depends on one specific bee to do the deed.
“Talk about speed dating for flowers!” Waldor Orchids pointed out in the signage on its vanilla orchid display.
That super-specific requirement is why vanilla growers have to hand-pollinate flowers – one-by-one at the precise time – to induce the plants to produce the long, skinny bean-like pods that give us our beloved flavoring.
Harvest time is also short and tricky, plus it takes two months of curing to ready the pods for processing.
Vanilla is the only orchid that gives us edible fruits, says Waldor Orchids, which showed us 16 tripods of vanilla orchid vines growing in a tropical garden at the show.