FLOWERS IN FEBRUARY

FLOWERS IN FEBRUARY

BY CLAIR ENLOW
Landscape Northwest editor

It's stagy, commercial and crowded.

The Northwest Flower and Garden Show also brings thousands of
Putting the final touches on Robert Chittock's "Cite d'Amour" designed for Molbak's.
winter-weary customers in search of a dream together with landscape professionals in a fun and fantastic environment.

"It's the Woodstock of the landscape industry," sad Duane Kelly, who staked his savings on founding the annual event at the Convention Center just eight years ago.

This year's visitors found a rich display of romantic vignettes that took them from 18th century Paris to the jungle and from China to the deep English countryside.

Over each other's shoulders, they saw a stepped and castellated assembly of faux bronze and fountains, a hermit's abode at the "Lost Love Mine," a tropical mountainside where an entomologist has entered "The Cloud Forest," a crumbling ruin of a pavilion in behind a rocky stream and a gnarled tree.

"In all modesty, it's a spectacular performance," said Kelly.

In square feet and attendance, the show has exceeded itself each year, and 1997 is no exception.

"The landscape business has grown," he said, "And there's a lot of business that goes into the show."

And there are a lot of people who come to buy.

Every year, the Flower and Garden Show is exquisitely timed to get the ideas -- and the money -- flowing before the days start to lengthen and the sun comes out.

Duane Kelly, beeper in hand, makes the rounds hours before the 1997 show opens.
The display gardens of the first few shows were completely dominated by landscape contracting companies and nurseries. But increasingly, according to Kelly, landscape architects are getting into the act. They recognize the creative and financial benefits of residential landscape design, he said, and have been impressed with the business the show generates.

The Northwest Flower and Garden Show is the third largest in the U.S., after Boston and Philadelphia, attracting a crowd of close to 100,000. This year, it covered five acres of convention center floor and included 50,000 square feet of "gardens," representing 33 exhibitors that come from British Columbia to Oregon. There are were no less than 100 seminars spiked with international garden celebrities and 300 commercial booths.

Ribbons bedeck the signposts in front of many of the exhibits and some posts nearly wilt with the burden of honor.

How good are they?

"These gardens would be winning awards in Philadelphia and London," said Kelly.

The quality of the performance is partially due to lots of cross pollinization between the shows.

"There's a knowledge transfer from Philadelphia," said Kelly. That transfer includes pre-season visits from "big names" in horticulture, who hold September workshops on the special technical and artistic skills that go into designing and presenting a live dream for five days.

It takes tricks from the theater like shortened perspective and special lighting. And since the props are the play, workshop participants learned about the telling detail like the trowel in the dirt.

Among the most important skills: forcing plants. "That's what it takes to make the magic," said Kelly.

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