Passport to the World is this year's theme at the Philadelphia Flower Show, and it is one of the top shows there I've seen (and I've seen many).
It's a passport to the end of winter and those many snowstorms ... and it's inspiration for the coming year in the garden.
This Australian tree fern was my favorite plant of this year's show ... although I also admired the New Zealand flax (Phormium 'Maori Queen').
As you enter the show, you encounter the Explorer's Garden, featuring some of the "exotic" plants that appeared at the first flower show back in 1829. Among them are poinsettias, peonies, magnolias, and even the lowly impatiens. But the Explorer's Garden also has giant water-platters grown at Longwood Gardens and other real rarities. One is a vessel fern (Angiopteris evecta) from the US Botanic Garden in Washington DC, a direct descendant of a plant brought back on the Wilkes expedition, an around-the-world trip in 1838-42 led by US Navy Lt. Charles Wilkes that collected 50 thousand plant and bird specimens and more than 250 live plants. "Having living plants from the Wilkes Expedition thriving in our collections gives us a great sense of the history of horticulture and botany in North America," said US Botanic Garden Executive Director Holly Shimizu.
There are many other worldly delights at this flower show -- exhibits that show off the plants of Brazil, Thailand, the Netherlands, Japan, Korea, China, and Africa, along with orchids from Singapore and tulips from Holland.
One thing you surely should not miss is the bonsai exhibit by Rosade Bonsai Studio, with some plants that are more than 100 years old. A lovely specimen is shown below.
But don't miss this Philadelphia Flower Show. It really is quite spectacular.
beautiful flower ....... good pictures
Posted by: k4midi | March 02, 2010 at 10:37 AM