The 11th Annual Boston Flower & Garden
Show ended after a run of three days (of its scheduled five) this past
week. The stated reason was concern for
crowds amid the COVID-19 contagion.
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| The Master Gardeners booth in 2011 |
The Coronavirus threat was certainly real and likely
doomed the show before it opened.
Volunteers were afraid to come in and work on exhibits or to take in
amateur horticulture; and amateur horticulturalists were afraid to bring in
their plants for display. Master
Gardeners, always a popular stop for visitors, elected at the last minute not to have
a presence. The Massachusetts
Horticultural Society formally withdrew its participation just before the
opening and had an exhibit, but no people explaining it or soliciting
memberships.
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| Bayside Expo Center; it leaked, but you couldn't beat the location |
But it did not matter because there were no crowds.
Ten years ago, the Seaport World Trade Center was a
suitable compromise for a flower show.
While substantially smaller than the decrepit Bayside Exposition Center
in Dorchester, where the defunct New England Spring Flower Show held forth for
about two decades of its 137-year existence, Seaport had certain advantages: it
was available and it was surrounded by a sea of cheap parking (think $6 to $10
a day). The Seaport World Trade Center
was itself the remnant of a1950s-era cruise ship terminal, leased from the
Massachusetts Port Authority and spiffed up by Fidelity Investment, which had
several thousand employees in the area.
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| The Seaport area in 2010 |
The move to Seaport also opened the tantalizing
opportunity of drawing after-work crowds from Boston’s Financial District, about
a mile away. The ‘old’ flower show,
while nominally in a string of city venues dating back to Horticultural Hall,
was always thought of as a ‘suburban’ show.
Now, the spanking-new Silver Line could deliver city residents and
office workers to the show’s doorstep.
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| Me, in front of Mass Hort's 2012 display garden |
For the first few years, everything clicked. Mass Hort ran all aspects of the amateur
horticulture side of the show – two classes of floral design competitions, Ikebana,
photography, a bookstore, miniature gardens, plant displays – and the Paragon
Group, a professional event management firm, ran everything else. I know all this because, for three years, I
was the guy who volunteered to plan, manage and shepherd Mass Hort’s presence
at the show.
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| This was a parking lot as late as 2016 |
By 2013, though, the parking lots were giving way to
new office construction as the ‘Seaport District’ was born as the preferred
home for upstart technology companies and the more staid professional firms
that wanted a hipper image. The handful of remaining surface lots demanded $20 for
any part of a day, and parking in office and hotel garages was a staggering
$36. The suburban core of show-goers complained of extortionate parking changes
or mile-long walks. Despite well-planned
promotions, the after-five crowd never really materialized.
The question of whether to stay at Seaport was made
moot when, in 2019, Fidelity announced it would close Seaport in mid-2020 and
re-build the site for office use. If it
was to continue, the Boston Flower and Garden Show needed to find a new home.
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| The Boston Convention Center |
There was one seemingly obvious choice: the nearby
Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.
The problem was, the Boston Flower & Garden Show did not fit the
profile of an event the BCEC was built to to host. BCEC was built to draw big conventions to
Boston. If you fill enough hotel rooms
for enough nights, you can have the space for free (think an international
medical convention for nine days). The
flower show, unfortunately, draws a local audience and so fills very few
rooms. Even if BCEC could fit the show
into the schedule, the price would be exorbitant. Paragon began its search and negotiations as
soon as Fidelity made its announcement, with a goal of announcing a new venue
before the 2020 show. That hasn’t happened.
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| Floral design competitions ended in 2018 |
The question is why there has been no
announcement. There are two reasonable
answers. The first is this: BCEC is either
too expensive or cannot commit to a same-week-each-year schedule that allows
vendors to save the date. Paragon is
widening its search across the region to find a suitable location that still
keeps it as a ‘Boston’ show. The answer
makes sense. There is no existing
150-250,000 square foot space in the immediate area with adequate parking or
public transit access. And, you can’t
create one. The old Bayside was a failed
1960s shopping center. When it closed,
it sat dormant until the Expo Center idea came along. In 2019, twenty miles south of Boston, the
Hanover Mall emptied out. It is already
being carved up for high-density apartments and a ‘lifestyle’ center.
The second reasonable answer is that Paragon has
concluded a hybrid horticulture/flower/garden show in Boston is a concept
that has passed its sale-by date.
Everything I’ve written to this point had been
factual. What follows is personal
observation:
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| Mahoney's Garden Center 2012 exhibit |
In the past three or four years, the show has
noticeably declined in quality. The
number of landscape exhibits has fallen to a handful (in its heyday, there were
20 or more ‘serious’ landscape displays), and the horticultural content of many
of the remaining ones is minimal.
Creating a first-class landscape is expensive, driven by the cost of
forcing high-quality plants, some of which will likely become mulch after the
show closes. As a savvy landscaper
putting together an exhibit once told me, “It don’t cost anything to force
stone.” Many of the displays at recent
shows were lots of attractive stonework and a handful of flowering plants; some
of them barely leafed out and not even close to being in flower.
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| Garden clubs once vied to have a window display at the flower show |
The ratio of horticultural vendors has fallen. The Mass State Treasury and Shelf Genie are
not what visitors pay $20 to see. Such
vendors fill in the outer fringe of any consumer-oriented show. When they encroach into the second ring of
booths, they cast a pall over the ‘legitimate’ vendors with quality gardening-centric
goods to sell.
Eight years ago, there were two floral design
divisions: both with up to eight classes; each with four designs. Visitors saw as many as 64 floral designs
and, if they came back three days later, there would be 64 different
designs by another group of amateur designers. But times change. Floral design does not attract nearly as many
fresh faces. Many of the older designers
now spend March in warm-weather climates.
Despite valiant efforts, last year, the Garden Club Federation of
Massachusetts threw in the towel and said they would no longer be part of the
flower show. The result was, at the 2019
show, there were a handful of themeless, individual designs.
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| Amateur horiculture circa 2011 |
When the show was at Bayside, amateur horticulture
overflowed its allotted space. Yes, as a
plant enthusiast you sat on the Southeast Expressway for half an hour, but you
got your plants entered and, for eleven days, the public ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’
over them because AmHort was front and center because the Massachusetts
Horticultural Society put it there. There
were window displays and club displays and entire collections from plant
societies. There were also six, glorious
‘miniature gardens’: an entire landscape captured in a space two feet on a side
and viewed through a window.
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| The pool of miniature gardens designers, alas, aged out |
When the show moved to Seaport, all that changed. Paragon allocated AmHort space in a large
meeting room beyond the glass windows that marked the ‘end’ of the exhibit hall. No amount of signage could induce people to
go through multiple sets of doors to get there. The owners of those plants did
not want to make the trip through interminable Boston traffic to drop off and
pick up their prized plants. Year by
year, the volume (though not the quality) of AmHort declined. Last year, there was so little it made no
sense to keep it in the conference center. At the same time, the never-large coterie
of miniature garden designers ‘aged out’ and the number of entries fell to four
and then, eventually, none.
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| The Philadelphia Flower Show is alive and well |
It isn’t that the era of ‘serious’ horticulture-centric
flower shows is over. Anyone who has
been to the Philadelphia Flower Show sees an extravaganza that has lost none of
its luster. It isn’t even a New England
problem: a flower show has arisen in Portland, Maine in the past six years that
is both serious and fun. The Connecticut
Flower Show holds its own and it, too, takes place in the heart of a city. The Newport Flower Show (held in June) is
chockablock with high-quality amateur horticulture.
But, perhaps the underlying problem for Boston is that
commercial, profit-centered businesses ought to run ‘patio and garden’ shows,
and simply shed the idea of incorporating horticulture. I do not know if Paragon (an organization with
people I greatly respect) has turned a profit on the last few shows. I do know that vendors complained of
poor show traffic (and being miffed at having sellers of skin care products as
their neighbor across the aisle).
The Massachusetts Horticultural Society has new
leadership. Perhaps it is time the organization charts a new course for a
horticultural event of its own design.
