The NW Flower & Garden Show
24 hours in Seattle
Posted by: Kate Bryant on Feb 13, 2012 at 09:19AM
4 Comments
Chickens aren’t a fad – they’re here to stay. At least, I think so. So I liked “The Dinner Bell Rings: Eat Your Yard” by Cascadian Edible Landscapes. It was cute (combine chickens and an old VW and how can you go wrong?) and won a bronze medal at the show.
View Slideshow » Illustration:This display titled “Birdsong” was created by the Seattle’s Washington Park Arboretum on conjunction with Seattle Audubon. It won the gold medal and was definitely the most natural of the displays, full of wildlife-friendly and winter-flowering plantings.
View Slideshow » Illustration:Judith Jones of Fancy Fronds Nursery in Gold Bar, WA presented my favorite display garden but she only won a crystal award. I loved the theme (“Tales of Wonder: In a Persian Garden”) with plenty of ferns (dry land ferns in the “desert” areas, lush types in the “oasis” area) and lots of other unusual plants scattered around.
View Slideshow » Illustration:Judith Jones of Fancy Fronds fern nursery in Gold Bar, WA. She and her fellow ferniac took the theme all the way!
View Slideshow » Illustration:Ravenna Gardens Nursery had a wonderful terrarium display that won an award. I noticed that the book I co-authored – Terrarium Craft was opened on the table… naturally, we loved this display! It was titled, “The Terrarium Maker’s Studio” and won the best plant material award.
View Slideshow » Illustration:This was my favorite display at the Seattle show, made by Cultivar, LLC, a Seattle landscape design & build firm, and collaborating with terrarium maker midnightblossom.com. The display was called “Portholes & Time: Gardens in a Minor Scale”. We loved the attention to detail and the charm of the entire display, from tiny snowdrops in moss to the pretty miniature window boxes on one side, the variety of terrariums and the materials laid out inside.
View Slideshow » Illustration:Side view with windowboxes affixed to a mossy wall.
View Slideshow » Illustration:A suspended terrarium
Thanks to this past weekend’s trip to Seattle for the NW Flower & Garden Show, I feel like it’s spring!
I couldn’t make it to the media preview event, but I did get some time on the show floor Thursday morning, before it opened to the public. It’s great because the lights are on and it’s much easier to take photos that don’t look like they’re undersea. Why are the lights so darned dim for these garden shows, anyway?
This year’s Seattle show succeeded in inspiring thousands of visitors – me included. Of course, you can’t help responding to the sight, color and scent of daffodils, tulips, and spring flowering shrubs, all pressed into bloom a couple of months early. But I find the Seattle show is especially good at providing actual design inspiration. Every year, there are about a dozen small vignettes in the bright corridor between the two main exhibition halls, at least a couple of which are dreamy enough to inspire admiring crowds of visitors to stand gawking (and blocking the passage).
The display gardens always include a few truly inspiring arrangements and this year, as in the past, I found some knock-out examples of container plantings and even some plants I hadn’t seen before. (Judith Jones’ Fancy Fronds Nursery in Gold Bar, WA presented some great ferns from her collection that I’d never seen except in books.) And there were some creative, thoughtfully presented demonstration gardens that looked like real gardens, not plants stuck in bark dust, including the gold medal winner garden called Birdsong, created by the Washington Park Arboretum and Seattle Audubon.
Check out the slide show to see some of the most inspiring images from this year’s show!
Kate – So great you could make our tweetup, and take photos with the lights up! One reason we host the tweetup before the show opens is to enable writers to get better photos, so I’m glad you came.
I thought I’d answer your question about the lighting – The garden show has always used theatrical lighting, and each garden creator specifies their lighting. It’s to give a sense of drama and tell the story of the garden. It might have seemed darker this year, as a few garden creators designed gardens as if it were dusk or midnight. (The garden titled “If I Write You a Song in the Garden Tonight…” depicted a scene where a poet writes a song to his beloved at midnight.) ~ Janet
Great photos Kate! I wish I would have made it to the Persian Garden before the lights went down. She had the most exciting plants in the display garden area but it was difficult to see many of them.
It was fantastic to get in to the show before the lights were dimmed – my photos were far better for it. Yet I hold to my opinion that the lighting should be brighter at garden shows in general… I want to see plants, labels and people without squinting or having to keep reaching for my specs. Especially when the plants are actually interesting – as in Judith Jones’ Persian Garden display — the foliage is half the fun, and wants to be scrutinized! If folks are bothering to put plant labels there, they should be readable. It costs a bit more to brighten the lights but I’m sure it could be done economically, and even in way that focuses light so that it’s still mood-enhancing, not too glaring.
Kate, I agree with you that it was a bit dark for reading plant labels. Maybe we should take a flashlight along next year. I agree with you that the gardens were refreshing in that they looked like real gardens. And the succulent-laden magic carpets of the Persian Garden were indeed full of interesting plants. But I do like the drama of the theatrical lighting. Maybe some teeny-tiny LED uplighting for the plant signs . . .