Showless

February 23rd, 2021

   The end of February used to seem like the turning point to me between winter and the gardening season because that’s when the garden shows sprouted.

It’s always nice to see living gardens when it’s still winter outside.

   Not that many years ago, we had the Pennsylvania Garden Expo kicking things off at the Farm Show Building the last week of February, followed by York’s Garden Show at the York Fairgrounds, and then a landscaping/gardening presence at the Pennsylvania Home Show (a.k.a. the “builders show”), also at the Farm Show Building.

   The granddaddy of them all – the Philadelphia Flower Show – capped the spring preview with the world’s biggest, oldest indoor flower show over 10 days inside the 10-acre Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia.

   All of these shows featured flowers in bloom and the welcome scent of lawns and leaves, signaling that “real” spring wasn’t far off.

   This winter, none of them will happen.

   Both the Pennsylvania Garden Expo and the Pennsylvania Garden Show of York are extinct – the 13-year-old Expo going under after a last-gasp show in 2015 and PAGSY calling it quits after a 27-year run that ended with the 2019 show.

   The Covid-19 pandemic short-circuited this year’s Pennsylvania Home Show, while the Philadelphia Flower Show is the only one still scheduled, but not until June 5-13.

   I’m sure the Philly show will be high-quality despite going outside for the first time in its 192-year history. It’s just that it might not have the same allure since gardening season will be in full-steam mode everywhere else by then.

See details on the five trips Lowee’s Group Tours and I are planning to the 2021 Philly Flower Show.

   Indoor garden shows in late winter made sense because gardeners usually have had enough of cold and snow by then and are ready to feel some warmth and see blooming gardens, albeit contrived ones built on concrete floors and clothed in mulch mounds.

   I’ll never forget the first time I saw the Philadelphia Flower Show some 30 years ago. Back then, the show was held in the Philadelphia Civic Center.

   To get to the show floor, you came in at street level and went down an escalator that gradually opened into a view of the displays from above.

   It was a grand unveiling, and you could instantly smell spring after trudging through the melted snow to get there.

   Late-winter shows are also a way for the display-building landscapers to get job leads for the coming season and for gardening vendors to kick-start their year by selling seeds, plants, tools, and such in the show marketplaces.

   The finishing touch for visitors is the lineup of talks and demos that the shows always presented.

   The main challenge has been profitability.

Displays like this main-entry one at the 2015 Philadelphia Flower Show are very expensive to install.

   Indoor shows cost a lot to put on. It’s a major investment of time and work, especially for landscapers who weigh whether the investment will deliver sufficient leads and whether they could be better spending the time building walls or plowing snow.

   The irony is that many of the best landscapers see no need to do shows because they already have plenty of projects lined up.

   Many garden centers don’t participate in shows because they do better selling out of their own places and/or stage their own events.

   What happened in the case of Expo and PAGSY is that the landscape displays became fewer and less elaborate while the marketplaces took on more and more non-gardening vendors, such as banks, hot-tub sellers, and utility companies.

   A final show blow in at least some years is the weather.

   An ill-timed blizzard can kill crowds, costing a day or two in lost revenues that can make the difference between squeezing out a profit and losing money.

   The Philly show has long been plagued by this threat, and PAGSY promoter Rick Jacobus mentioned snow-caused hits that happened in each of the two years before that three-day show closed.

   It’ll be interesting to see how an outdoors Philly Flower Show goes over this year.

   The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which produces the show, isn’t sure what to expect and is guessing on maybe half or less of the usual 250,000 indoor attendance.

   The 2021 show is to take place over nine days and 15 acres at South Philadelphia’s FDR Park (June 5-13). The theme is a nature-oriented one called, “Habitat: Nature’s Masterpiece.”

   Timed and advance ticketing is required to help spread out the crowds.

   Besides addressing pandemic concerns about drawing people into a crowded indoor venue, the outdoor FDR Park show offers a couple of pluses.

   One is that the landscape displays have the potential for more color and diversity, given that the designers aren’t limited to what can be forced into bloom in a greenhouse in time for late-winter display.

   Another is that plant vendors will be able to sell more varieties and bigger plants that are ready to go in visitors’ gardens. At a late-winter indoor show, vendors are more limited to seeds, dormant bulbs, houseplants, and young plants that visitors have to keep inside until safe-planting time.

London’s Chelsea Flower Show is primarily an outdoor show.

   Staging a garden show outdoors isn’t exactly unheard-of, after all. Germany, France, and the Netherlands each hold elaborate and successful growing-season shows, and England stages the best known of them all – the Chelsea Flower Show in London, this year moving its six-day show from May to September.

   PHS isn’t planning on going outdoors in June for good – at least not for now.

   Planning is already under way for the 2022 show, which will go back inside the Pennsylvania Convention Center in late winter.