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| Me, way back when. You can double-click on the photos to see a slideshow. |
Before I go further, I need to say I have a strong
interest the Boston Flower and Garden Show (BF&GS), as well as its predecessor,
the New England Spring Flower Show (NESFS).
It’s an emotional investment: I ran the Massachusetts Horticultural Society’s activities at the BF&GS for three years, and helped build flower show exhibits for several years prior to that.
This essay’s title is intended to pose two questions; one geographical
and the other philosophical. Both are
hard problems with no easy answers.
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| The old Bayside Expo Center |
I’ll start with location. After a peripatetic existence in the 1950s
and 1960s, the ‘old’ New England Spring Flower Show settled into a long run at
the Bayside Exposition Center in Dorchester, six miles south of Boston’s Financial
District. The facility, a failed
shopping mall, leaked and was abysmally maintained. But it was cavernous and had location in its
favor: just off the Southeast Expressway with thousands of adjacent, reasonably-priced parking spaces (attractive for suburbanites), and
walking distance from the MBTA Red Line (convenient for city dwellers).
The move to the Seaport World Trade Center was a compromise. At roughly 120,000 square feet, it was less
than half the size of Bayside, but Bayside was shutting down. The Paragon Group (the group sponsoring the
BF&GS) could not guarantee the hotel bookings necessary to secure the use of
the Boston Convention and Exposition Center (BCEC). Seaport became, quite literally, the only
game in town. The other facilities were
too small or not available.
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| Two years ago this was a surface parking lot across from Seaport. I took this photo on the show's last day. |
In 2010, the first year of the Seaport venue, things
went reasonably well. Seaport (itself a
repurposed and re-built cruise ship terminal) was a hotel and office complex
amid a sea of cheap, surface-level parking lots. Mass Hort had no problems drawing floral
designers, amateur horticulturalists, and volunteers for the show; and show attendees found ample, reasonably-priced parking Within two years, though, the Seaport District
began its transformation into an office and residential district. Within six years, the cost to park for a few
hours soared from $11 to $36 and traffic bogged down in a morass of lane
closures.
Then, last year, Fidelity Investments announced it
would close Seaport’s exhibition hall in mid-2020. Moving the show became not an option but, rather,
a necessity.
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| Seaport's footprint, while hardly ideal, is better than alternatives |
Where can it go? In my opinion, suburban Gillette
Stadium’s field house at just 80,000 square feet, is too small for the show. The Back Bay’s Hynes Convention Center has
150,000 square feet of space, but it is on two floors and has the same access issues
as Seaport. BCEC is unlikely to make an
exception to its hotel/night formula. Absent
a mall closing down (always a possibility in the current retail landscape) or a
well-situated warehouse becoming vacant, the alternative is to relocate the
Boston Flower and Garden Show elsewhere in New England.
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| Is there still a demand? |
Which goes to the heart of the second question: is
there still a demand for a late-winter flower and garden show? Having been to Philadelphia and being acquainted with the Maine Flower Show in Portland, I can easily argue there is an audience. But the Philadelphia Flower Show, run since 1829
by the powerhouse Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, is a sensual extravaganza
that draws a quarter million attendees from the northeast and mid-Atlantic
states. It will go on as long as Penn
Hort is around. Now in just its third
year, the Maine Flower Show is intimate by design and is profitable on 50,000
attendees. Although held at the end of March,
it is in a location where nothing will be green for at least another six or
eight weeks.
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| Waiting to get into the New England Spring Flower Show in the 1950s |
I cannot help but feel – and this is personal opinion –
that ‘flower shows’ in northern urban centers have been bypassed by time and
technology. In 1960, the ‘winter vacation’ was the province of the wealthy. Today, for $79, Jet Blue will fly a Bostonian
to Ft. Myers or Ft. Lauderdale, where the flowers and greenery don’t have to
be forced and six hours of artificial spring isn’t followed by stepping into icy puddles accompanied by a blast of 35°
wind.
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| Mass Hort's exhibit in 2012. Everything was in bloom. |
Also, in my opinion, the 2019 BF&GS was a dispiriting
affair. I know landscape exhibits; I
know what it takes to force plants to be fully in leaf and flowering for mid-March:
it requires a large greenhouse heated to 80° for as long as three months and a lot of tender loving care for thousands of plants. Yet, at this year's show, I walked by one exhibit by a ‘major’ landscaper in
which dozens of azaleas were barely leafed out and not a single one was in
flower. To me, it was inexcusable - or cheap (forced plants must be returned to those same greenhouses until May). Many other exhibits consisted more of stone
than of plants ("It don't cost a dime to force stone," an exhibitor once told me). And, if the landscapers aren’t
putting their hearts into it, why should a visitor pay $20?
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| Amateur horticulture at the 2019 flower shoe was a high point... |
Mass Hort wisely moved its entry day for amateur
horticulture to Sunday from Monday to avoid fighting Boston’s legendary
traffic. The change, however, only
paused the long slide in participation. While
the entries were of wonderful quality, they came from a shrinking pool of
amateurs willing to make two treks into the city: one to drop off their plants
and another to retrieve them.
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| ... and amateur photography was dazzling with entries from everywhere |
Getting floral designers and judges to come into
Boston was becoming difficult by 2012, my last year of running Mass Hort’s
activities at the show. Why? Because so many designers now winter in warmer
climates. This year, the Garden Club Federation
of Massachusetts formally dropped out of the show, dramatically reducing the number
of floral design exhibits on view. Only Ikebana (which expanded to fill the
space formerly allotted to the two floral design divisions) and Amateur
Photography delivered the ‘wow’ impact I believe show attendees deserve (and
those activities were relegated to the nearly invisible conference center
beyond the exhibit hall).
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| Is it a bygone era? |
This is a difficult essay to write because – as I
stated at the outset – I have an emotional investment in the success of the flower
show. With the benefit of 20/20
hindsight, the ten years at Seaport sapped the show of its energy by its
smaller footprint and relative inaccessibility to the show’s target audience. Paragon does not publish attendance figures,
but my observation is that the show draws fewer people each year. Friends tell me Paragon has told them there
will definitely be a flower show at Seaport in 2020, and that a search is on
for a suitable venue for 2021 and beyond.
I wish them success, but I fear the winds of change have sealed the show’s
fate.
