Requiem for a Flower Show

The 11^th 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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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:

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.