What the World Needs Now Is... A Flower Show

Flower shows are big deals for
garden clubs

Spring is the season for flower shows. Here in New England, seemingly every other town’s garden club has one in May or June.  There are multiple classes of floral designs to admire, plus table after table of amateur horticulture: irises, peonies, flowering branches, early roses, and every annual imaginable.  Notices of the event go out in the local paper and signs appear on Main Street inviting the public to partake of a delight for the senses.

The flower shows we're used to won't
work in a time of social distancing

But not this year.  In a season of shelter-in-place orders and social distancing mandates, town garden clubs put a giant ‘X’ though the balance of their 2019-2020 schedule back in early March, including not just monthly meetings and road trips but special events such as flower shows.  They’ll re-group and (fingers crossed) start fresh in September. 

At a flower show, everything is up
close and personal - a no-no in 2020

The plight of local clubs extends to state and regional garden club organizations.  I had been invited to speak at several conventions this spring and I noted in their schedules that each had a major flower show attached to the listing of events.  Not a single one of those shows took place as scheduled.  And, the disappointment went all the way to National Garden Clubs, Inc., which cancelled its May convention for the first time ever.  It, too, had an enormous flower show as one of its attractions (Betty was part of the show’s committee).

Sometimes, though, you can’t keep a good idea down.  When the word went out that the NGC convention was to be a victim of Covid-19, the organization’s president, Gay Austin, made a phone call to a guy named David Robson and asked the question: “what would it take to make the flower show an on-line event?”

David Robson, directing the
building of a peacock

David is a retired Extension Horticultural Specialist at the University of Illinois, and so has a certain amount of spare time on his hands.  He is also one of the behind-the-scenes forces in the flower show world.  He could have told Ms. Austin, ‘search me’ or ‘it’s impossible’, but he did neither.  Instead, he started thinking about the logistics of holding a standard flower show (the term of art for one that adheres to a very specific set of rules) on the internet.  There was, naturally, no precedent.  It has never been attempted before.

He then went a step further and wondered what would happen if, instead of having just the 30 or so floral designers who were to have participated in the original event, plus the hundred or so people who might have brought horticultural entries to Milwaukee (where the convention was to have been held), NGC invited the entire garden club world to participate?

Clip the best flowers in
your garden, take photos...

That is exactly what is going to happen:  Download the schedule.  Choose one of the seven horticultural categories (including flowers, foliage, and arboreals among others).  Photograph your entry in the approved manner, and email it with your entry form (there is no entry fee). Your entry will be examined by accredited flower show judges.

It’s such an audacious idea it just might work. 

I am pleased to count David Robson as a friend (he’s the guy who hooked me into building peacocks in the rain at the Newport Flower Show last year).  When he called to ask Betty to be part of the committee (and, yes, Betty is in the schedule as chair of one of the horticultural sections), I broke into the conversation to ask him how many horticultural entries he thought Betty might end up reviewing.

“It depends on how successful the show is,” he replied, verbally bobbing and weaving.

“Well,” I asked, “what constitutes the low end of ‘successful’?”

“A couple of hundred entries,” he allowed.

“Then, what’s the high end?” I pressed.

After a few moments for contemplation, he replied, “The server crashes.”

This could be yours!

I’m rooting for the server to crash.  I’ll bet that between now and June 15th (the period entries will be accepted), your garden is ablaze with color.  Assuming your garden club is NGC-affiliated, clip the best half dozen of those flowers or branches, rig up a white board to put behind them and a clear bottle to put them in.  Take the required six photos of each specimen as described in the guide.  Fill in the entry form. Email it off.

Judging will take place between June 16 and June 30, with winners notified shortly thereafter.  And I hope this time next month I'll be writing about what happened when David’s server crashed.

The Bucket List - 1

For two months, Betty and I adhered to both the letter and the spirit of Massachusetts’ ‘shelter-in-place’ order.  We went once a week to the supermarket during ‘senior hours’ shopping time, we socially distanced ourselves from friends, and our car’s gas gauge barely budged.  Our lone extravagances were trips to the Community Garden and long walks around Medfield to avoid packing on the ‘Quarantine 15’.

We adjusted as we went along; learning how to navigate the pandemic in a way that didn’t cause us to go crazy in the process.  Principal among these was skipping those ‘senior hours’, when 50 of us would be in line at 6 a.m.  We now go at 9 a.m., walk directly into the store, and find the shelves are fully stocked.  We also made two, 88-mile runs out to Andrews Greenhouse for vegetables, perennials, and annuals.  You have to support local agriculture, after all; and if you get an exhilarating, traffic-free drive out the Mass Pike in the bargain, so much the better.

The last tine my hair was this long, it
was brown and Nixon was president

Two weeks ago, Massachusetts began a cautious return toward a ‘new normal’.  On May 27, I was my barber’s fourth customer.  It was my first trim since the middle of February.  My hair hadn’t been that long since 1969.  Two days later, our favorite bakery re-opened and a pair of chocolate croissants graced our breakfast table.  These are the important things in life.

But there is more to life than chocolate and shorter hair.  There are gardens and open spaces. 

You can walk neighborhoods only so long before they all start to feel alike and, by mid-May, our walks were getting frankly repetitive.  Then, Trustees of Reservations gradually opened its most-lightly-trafficked properties.  We walked one less than three miles from our home that we had ignored for decades because it was ‘just a trail through the woods’.  Oh, were we wrong.  We even enjoyed getting lost by missing the turn in our trail.

Phlox stolonifera at Garden in the Woods

Then, came the electrifying emails: the opening of several gardens to members on a timed-ticket basis.  We jumped at the opportunity.  Our first excursion was to Garden in the Woods, the Framingham home of Native Plant Trust (formerly the New England Wildflower Society). May 29th was a beautiful day and the woodland garden was in its peak spring glory.  A field of blue phlox greeted us. Trilliums were everywhere. 

Yellow lady slippers

Frogs and turtles basked on tree trunks semi-submerged in a pond.  Native Plant Trust may have taken social distancing too far: there were just three cars when we arrived at 10 a.m., and seven when we departed at 11:30.

Tower Hill was in its spring glory

Next was Tower Hill Botanical Garden, the home of the Worcester County Horticultural Society.  The site is an old farm high above the Wauchusett Reservoir. When we go to Tower Hill, it is usually for an indoor event and, while we always knew the gardens were there, we had never walked all of them at once.  We corrected that error on June 2nd. 

Everywhere, plants were awaiting
their new homes

We were the first car through the gate at 9:50 a.m.  When we departed a few minutes before noon, there were perhaps 30 cars in the parking lot, though I suspect more than a few of those belonged to volunteers and staff, because everywhere we went, beds were in the process of being planted.

It is a beautiful garden with a lovely mix of annuals, perennials, shrubs and mature trees.  Its lone drawback, at least in my view, is the dominance of Asian cultivars. American gardening is bending toward native specimens, and to see so many Japanese and Chinese trees and shrubs – despite their beautiful, variegated leaves and sinuous branches – is disappointing when conservationists and naturalists are demonstrating the critical role of native plants for pollinators.

At the top of Tower Hill....

We walked each of Tower Hill’s gardens and savored them.  We sat in Adirondack chairs overlooking the reservoir.  We hiked to the peak of the eponymous hill to see scenery little changed by time.  It was a picture-perfect morning.

Yesterday (June 3), we made the 55-mile drive to Crane Beach in Ipswich.  In my opinion, this is the crown jewel of the Trustees of Reservation; it had opened only a week earlier, and only on an ‘experimental basis’.  On-line tickets were snapped up in a few hours.

So much beach, so few people...

We know Crane Beach intimately.  Its four miles of fully-protected and undeveloped, white-sand beach backed by dunes is a treasure.  Also, as retirees with a highly flexible schedule, we can go when the crowds aren’t there.  But nothing prepared us for the sight of the beach on a perfect, 75-degree day with only sparse family groups on the ‘lifeguard’ section of the beach, and only the occasional walker along the other 95 percent of the coastline.  The endangered piping plovers that call the dune home were the lone competition to the sound of the ocean.

Warnings amid the dunes

We stayed two hours (our ticket was good for all day, so there are definitely kinks to be worked out in the reservation process) and left tired but rejuvenated.  Of course, being so close, we also ticked off two more ‘to do’ items on our post-pandemic bucket list: fried clams and onion rings at J.T. Farnham’s, and homemade ice cream at White Farms.

Our next outing will be to the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden.  But that’s a story for another time.