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Founts of Inspiration: Getting the Most from a Garden Show

© Carol Wallace

People-watching at a garden show is almost as much fun as plant-watching. The show-goers run the gamut from reluctant spouses, dragging their feet and muttering "We can't afford this--get away from that lemon tree" to the novice gardener, clicking madly with the camera hoping to capture a picture to recreate in his or her own yard, to the more experienced ones who yawn at yet another bulb display and occasionally take notes on an inspired plant combination.

Thank heavens my husband falls into the second category. When we went to the Philadelphia Flower Show this week he was quite happy, pointing and shooting. And he had a lovely time.

Ironically, he was afraid to go to the show, quite certain that I would see the perfect garden and insist that we recreate it in our yard. I pointed out that these show gardens are often very lovely, and often very impossible. As beautiful as a garden full of nodding yellow daffodils and blue delphinium might be, it's not going to happen in nature.As luscious as a garden dripping with orchids may appear--it's not going to happen in northeastern PA. So what is it that we get out of a flower show?

For one thing, both my husband and I view it as a sanity-saver. We drive over highways bounded by snow, pay our fee and walk into a ten-acre paradise where we can breathe the scent of moist earth and growing things. Just inhaling puts me back into that wonderful mode of being a gardener.

And then there are the ideas! Last year we went, while pondering what to do about a huge unlandscaped area by the gazebo where even grass refused to grow. An exhibit called Walk on Water featuring a pond largely glimpsed only through lacy shrubbery stopped us both in our tracks. We had no camera, and it's just as well, because we never could have duplicated it. Our land is not like the artificially formulated landscape in the Convention Center. But the idea was there. Create a large pond, glimpsed through a doorway of shrubs, groundcover and flowering plants. Even now, in its infancy, it makes the gazebo area an enchanted place.

This year the aim was simpler. Our gardens are planted, but can always be improved. The displays are great sources of ideas about which plants combine well. My notebook ever-handy, I took notes on all the combinations that struck my fancy, or on ideas they gave me for rearranging what I already had. For instance, I have always avoided yellows in the garden, but both were struck by a golden garden of coleus and other tropicals. In my mind I reinterpreted it using golden hostas and hakonochloa, lysimachia nummularia and yellow-blooming rhododendrons as a backdrop. That's what I wrote down, rather than the names of the flowers in the display.

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