2025 Philadelphia Flower Show: Reporter’s Notebook

March 11th, 2025

   I saw the 2025 “Gardens of Tomorrow” version of the Philadelphia Flower Show four times last week and gathered these assorted newsy tidbits and observations:

The animals are dining att the table in Jennifer Designs’ “Welcoming Wildlife Home” display.

The crowd favorite

   I’ve seen more than 30 Philadelphia Flower Shows now, and it seems that every show brings one particular crowd-pleasing display that everybody talks about.

   This year it was Jennifer Designs’ “Welcoming Wildlife Home” display, which most people were calling “the one with the animals at the table.”

   The animals were six oversized topiary wildlife creatures (squirrel, turtle, bee, etc.) made out of plant parts and enjoying dinner at a flower-covered table.

   The idea was to drive home the current hot trend of how gardens should be wildlife-friendly and helpful to the ecosystem.

   The playful display, which also won the show’s top award for florists, was surrounded by pollinator-friendly plantings.

Bottles to soil?

Glass sand is being used as a light coating of mulch over this soil.

    One of the more intriguing show exhibits was put together by OLIN Labs and Remark Glass, a pair of Philadelphia ventures that have teamed up to do something useful with the tons of glass bottles that get tossed in the trash.

   It turns out that when you pulverize ordinary bottle glass, it becomes much like sand, which then can be used most any way that commercially dug sand is used.

   OLIN and Remark have been doing field trials in the Philadelphia area using “glass sand” along with topsoil and compost in a bioretention basin to improve drainage.

   The blend has been working great, and plants are showing no negative signs, said OLIN landscape architect Pia von Barby in a show talk about the concept.

   She says bottle glass is one of the most promising and “circular” (recyclable) materials for improving garden soil and growing in containers.

   A non-profit called Bottle Underground has started collecting some of the 90,000 tons of glass bottles that are landfilled each year in Philadelphia alone and grinding them into a bagged mix of compost, glass sand, and topsoil called Gritty Cactus and Succulent Blend. It’s available so far in the Philadelphia area through Bennett Compost.

   “When you reuse a container, you’re saving pound for pound that much sand coming out of the ground,” said Rebecca Davies, one of Remark’s co-founders.

   Glass sand can also be used over top of soil, creating a colorful mulch when colored bottles are pulverized.

   “It’s quite jewel-like,” Davies says. “It feels like sand, and it looks like sand. Pets can walk over it. It’s not going to hurt their paws.”

   She’s hoping the idea catches on in other areas to turn local waste into local resources.

This main entry garden got only lukewarm reviews from my bus travelers.

The 2025 show verdict?

   I hosted four busloads of midstate gardeners to the show last week, and on the way back, I always like to ask how everyone liked the show in comparison to other years. (A lot of our travelers go to the show every year.)

   This year’s verdict was… so-so. The overwhelming majority of repeat visitors rated the 2025 show as average – not better than most but also not worse than most.

   Besides the animals at the table, standout mentions went to 1.) the “Tomorrow’s Eden” display that was a forest setting with waterfall and a pair of steamy ponds (my favorite), 2.) the time-lapse photography of flowers opening, being shone in a 22-foot geodesic dome, 3.) the aquaponics educational garden with topiary pupils, and 4.) the tens of thousands of blooms that were everywhere.

   The main entry garden – usually the star of the show – got only lukewarm reviews.

   And as for what the veterans didn’t like compared to the past, the hands-down top mention was how there were noticeably fewer big landscape displays than in the past.

   I’ve also been noticing that since the show came back inside after the two outside years during COVID, the show is featuring fewer big landscape exhibits. Many of the past and best “regulars” weren’t there this year, such as Burke Brothers, Stoney Bank Nurseries, and J. Downend.

   If you want to see more pictures and details of the 2025 show, I did a post on PennLive.com on 14 of the show’s top sights.

Next year?

   The flower show used to do a grand unveil of the next year’s show theme during the middle of the current year’s show.

   That’s no longer the case. The show’s producer, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, now waits until late in the year to announce the theme of the next show – only two or three months in advance.

   Our bus groups always liked hearing about the next show on the way home from the current one. It got people excited and making plans to go a year out. Now I have to tell them what the show folks are telling me: “It’s a secret.”

   The only hint I heard of what’s in the works is that the show would like to draw participation from the many superb public gardens in the Philadelphia area. Philly has more public gardens than any other region in the U.S., but hardly any of them have any presence at the show, much less show gardens.

   That might change. One inside word I heard is that the show is courting Longwood, Chanticleer, and others to get involved in coming shows.

   I, for one, would love to see what Longwood might come up with if it built a display garden at the Philadelphia Flower Show.

Dennis Mawhinney is calling this geranium ‘Peppermint Surprise.’

What is Dennis up to now?

   Finally, one of the most interesting veteran show-goers is Dennis Mawhinney, a long-time Master Gardener from Dillsburg.

   Dennis is always up to something new, and I got to chat with him about two of his latest garden initiatives.

   One is his glowing (in more ways than one) report about a new type of indoor plant lighting called pulsed xenon grow lights.

   The lights use xenon gas, an inert gas that produces a spectrum close to sunlight, and pulses it 80 times a minute to save energy. (The gas is already used in photography.)

   Dennis says his first experimental pulsed xenon light got him ripe tomatoes from his small greenhouse a month earlier than past lights he’s used. He got his from a Texas company called Firefly-One, a division of Neotek Inc., if you’re a hobby greenhouse and/or curious.

   Dennis’ second project is “fathering” a new annual geranium that comes in a curious mottled pink blooming pattern. He noticed a sport of that pattern a few years ago after a mix of white, red, and pink interpollinated.

   He’s now in the process of growing cuttings and culling out the reversions in an attempt to stabilize the look into future generations.

   The variety will likely never make into the big-business world of plant introductions, but Dennis hopes it could be something that local gardeners can buy locally.

   He’s calling it ‘Peppermint Surprise.’