Theme of the 2019 Philadelphia Flower Show… and Highlights from 2018
March 11th, 2018
A lot of people are eager to know next year’s Philadelphia Flower Show theme even before the current show is over.
Here you go: “Flower Power.”
I’m guessing next year’s Flower-Power-themed Philadelphia Flower Show will feature at least one floral vehicle, like this one that Jane and Larry Shull have in their Perry County backyard.
Part of it will be a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, so expect peace signs, hippie accoutrements, and I’d imagine at least one VW bus with flowers painted on it.
But the bigger tie-in is that the main entrance will feature the official competition for the 2019 FTD World Cup of Flowers.
This is the global competition for floral designers. It’s where the world’s best designers try to outdo each other to win what’s essentially the gold medal in a flower-arranging Olympics.
The competition will kick off during the 2019 Philadelphia Flower Show’s preview day on Fri., March 1, 2019. Winners will be announced at a gala event on Sun., March 3, 2019.
All competitors will create four floral designs, and the top 10 semifinalists will create an additional design. The top five finalists will create one final design prior to the winner being announced.
The competition will be the 2019 “Flower Power” show’s central feature.
If you’re interested, the 2019 show takes place March 2-10, 2019. Lowee’s Group Tours and I once again plan to run bus trips there each show weekday: March 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Details and bookings will start this fall. Check my Talks and Trips page for when the 2019 trips are ready.
Meanwhile, the 2018 “Wonders of Water” show just ended after being disrupted for the third year in a row by a midweek snow.
See 25 photos I took at the 2018 Philadelphia Flower Show.
Snowstorms – and even the mere forecast of them – wreak havoc on the show’s bottom line because so many people (especially bus tours) just skip it. Storms also make the crowds worse the day before and the day after, as our Tuesday and Thursday tour-goers found out.
The rainforest main entry at the 2018 Philly Flower Show.
The show’s main entrance featured a rainforest with 4,000 suspended tropicals along with a 25-foot, five-level waterfall, a rope “bridge,” and several serene tropical ponds.
Streams, ponds, fountains, and water-related educational displays were everywhere this year.
The feedback I got from our busloads was that this was just an average year at best. Very few veteran show-goers said they liked the 2019 show better than most, while about a quarter of those I polled rated it not as impressive as usual.
One astute gardener observed that his middling opinion was largely because the usually mind-blowing main entrance didn’t really have an eye-grabbing focal point this year.
The rainforest entry was nice, but it wasn’t grand like, say, last year’s bulb-covered, life-sized bridge with canals that welcomed you to the Holland theme, or the movie marquee with red carpet that was the first view for 2015’s “Celebrate the Movies” theme.
The show nevertheless had several impressive display gardens.
Robertson’s Flowers wedding scene in the woods.
My favorite (and the favorite of most show-goers, based on my informal polling) was Robertson’s Flowers’ “Wedding, Woods, and Water,” which simulated a wedding scene taking place in the woods.
It featured log benches, a rustic arch covered with white orchids, a green wall, a floor of tree-branch discs, and a tree-stump table setting. The whole thing was backdropped by a 20-foot-long rain curtain that was showering water into a rectangular pond below.
My second favorite garden was Stoney Bank Nurseries’s desert-garden display, which showed what will grow when there isn’t enough water around.
Have a look at highlights of the 2019 show in a 25-picture photo gallery I just posted.
And if you like the looks of Stoney Bank’s desert garden, check out the photo gallery I posted on the best real-life desert garden I’ve ever seen – the one at California’s Huntington Library and Gardens.