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.
The flower show’s Main Entrance garden had color every which way you looked.
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.)
These are pods of the vanilla orchid drying.
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.
Those floral “clouds”
Show staff was fielding a lot of questions about those suspended floral clouds, which looked to be baskets of either pastel alyssum or baby’s breath. But how did they look so colorful and full?
It turns out the answer is spray paint. Staff filled the baskets with dried baby’s breath that was spray-painted various shades of pink, purple, and lavender.
I know one gardener who uses that same trickery on spent allium blooms to make it look like these otherwise brown-by-summer globes are blooming purple non-stop, right into fall. But is that considered cheating?
Oddball plants
The show is also good every year for showing off oddball plants in the Hamilton Horticourt amateur plant competition.
This monkey’s tail plant looks like fuzzy snakes draping down from the tall urn.
One that caught my eye this year was a monkey’s tail plant. This oddity had a Medusa appearance to it with snake-like arms of soft, fuzzy green draping three feet down from its urn home.
Another oddball was a golden succulent that was growing in a 10-inch wall in the shape of a bandstand shell… or maybe a catcher’s mitt.
Then there was a ‘White Ghost’ euphorbia with almost pure-white succulent foliage that reminded me of cabbage leaves.
And finally, I liked the ribbon-winning Melocactus matanzanus, which looked like a miniature barrel cactus with an eyeball growing on top.
Two more tree “issues”
Be on the lookout for two new tree troubles, the arborists at Bartlett Tree Services were warning show-goers.
Dark banding between the leaf veins is a tell-tale sign of beech leaf disease.
Credit: Emelie Swackhamer/Penn State Extension
One is already here: beech leaf disease. This nematode-caused disease can weaken trees into a slow death and has the tell-tale symptom of dark banding between the leaf veins.
The other alert involves crape myrtle bark scale, a potentially fatal problem caused by a bug that’s moving northward from the South but hasn’t been found yet in Pennsylvania. This bug latches onto branches and can suck the life out of crape myrtles, which up to now has been a relatively trouble-free species, save for dieback in cold winters.
Award-winning trash and weeds
How times have changed when it comes to favored garden styles. A generation ago, the standard was neat and organized gardens with clipped shrubs, tidy spacing, and every plant in its own place.
Now the natural look is in – including native plants, plant intermingling, and wildflowers instead of lawn.
The change was evident at the 2024 Philadelphia Flower Show, where the Best of Show award went to Apiary Studios’ display of a roadside where nature is the gardener. This display not only featured wildflowers and even dandelions, but trash strewn among the random plants like focal points.
Thirty years ago at my first show, visitors would’ve been aghast to see weeds and old cans in a display, much less one that earned top honors.
This year, next year, and beyond
No word yet on what next year’s show theme will be. If the staff knows, they’re not saying. The official word is that it’ll be announced in late summer.
This year‘s Unity by Flowers theme wasn’t announced until last November.
From the feedback I got from the five busloads of gardeners that Lowee’s Group Tours and I took to the 2024 show, people thought this was a slightly better than average year (or at least as good as usual).
They liked the super-colorful main-entrance garden, the diversity of gardens, the bees and “wild” gardens, and especially the revamped layout (wider paths and no walk-through gardens) that made the show seem less congested.
That mirrored what the show staff was hearing.
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the show’s presenter, marks its 200th anniversary in 2027, and the flower show turns 200 in 2029. Expect a pull-out-all-stops show that year.
The first Philadelphia Flower Show took place June 6, 1829, in the downtown Masonic Hall when a couple of dozen early PHS members introduced U.S. gardeners to Chinese peonies, a new lily that we know today as the Easter lily, and what’s become America’s top-selling potted plant, the poinsettia.