Philadelphia Flower Show
Pennsylvania Convention Center
1101 Arch St.
Philadelphia
Visited March 1
Showing through March 9, 2025
I briefly believed I had been born again when I stepped off the Septa into a mossy oasis of Japanese forest regeneration — until I woke up to pathways blocked by silver trophies and realized I misread the trail signage as litter.
The steamy pool of dry ice I’d been staring into (pictured above) was a BlueCross-sponsored diorama of “Tomorrow’s Eden,” assembled inside the Pennsylvania Convention Center where it won second-place at the Philadelphia Flower Show. The show is the largest and longest-running horticulture competition in the country.
This year’s show theme is “Gardens of Tomorrow.” The prompt turned out to be pretty dry potting soil. Tasked with arranging floralscapes of the future, contestants and vendors delivered dull displays that doomers could only call “dead-on.”
The lack of transportative power likely stemmed in part from the siloed nature of the expo center. Instead of submerging us in a terrarium of ideas, the Philadelphia Horticulture Society (PHS) opted to sentence us to a marketplace of imminent expiration.
“Visit the garden shop for exclusive bargains on tomorrow’s gear,” a robotic voice injected itself through warehouse air thick with allergens and artificial bird sounds. Patrons lined up at a “Bloom Bar” to get fitted for flower crowns. Mushroom tinctures touting adaptogenic benefits were on sale at crouched-down booths seemingly positioned around every corner of the maze. Television Network QVC styled a rosy centerpiece to market AirPods, supplements, spyware birdhouses and other invasive homegoods.
Flower shows are, at their core, a way for humans to assert control over entropy.
Flower arrangement is a different matter.
I was touched by on-view examples of ikebana, a centuries-old Japanese art of presenting flowers in their most natural form. The poetic name of the practice has been translated as “making flowers come alive,” and some argue its origin traces back to a Buddhist approach of invoking the gods through floral ceremonies. The prize-winning vases staged in Philadelphia this year expressed the racing curves of once sentient and searching branches. The flowers had been picked and cut for a particular purpose: to articulate the innate genius of our environment.
The root of flower shows, on the other hand, reaches back to the Victorian-era push to get botanists bringing exotic plants back to Britain. This is the legacy of the Philadelphia Flower Show, which is credited with introducing and popularizing Poinsettia to the public after a former U.S. secret agent-turned-diplomat named Joel Roberts Poinsett returned from Mexico with the red blossoms, unknowingly introducing what would later become an object of commercial Christmas craze.
The original sin of flower shows was exacerbated by Philly's overt focus on the commodification of what was once wild.
There’s a perversion to grooming wild species into perfected representatives of their class, holding them captive in solitary containers under anticipation that their organic beauty will one day be rewarded with polypropylene ribbons. That said, the concept can work: the highlight of my evening at the Philly flower extravaganza was observing up close the strange fur and spines of cacti I’d never seen before.
Still, that underlying philosophy of picking and prizing took abrupt and uncanny turns under PHS' curatorial direction. While galleries of photography, sculpture and collage offered righteous impressions of how we visually receive the raw power of plant life, other exhibits — such as a storefront design challenge featuring rose dog hedges as advertisements for grooming services under the brand name “Bark Avenue” — likened flowers to the kind of cheap candy that’s thrown in surplus onto the streets during parade days.
The worst part was the faux “Gardens of Tomorrow” designed to illustrate our imagined lifestyles down the line. The Men’s Garden Club of Philadelphia constructed a golf course that was, no joke, configured to make the “20th hole” easier for “duffers” to score. A next-door neighbor took a stab at incorporating a bizarre barrage of sustainable technology into their garden, including “edible landscaping, cell-engineered meat, rainwater catchment, manure composting, and an ethically designed enclosure.” That artist also covered the deck with cats (“a catio!” one passerby enthusiastically inferred) and a typewriter in an homage to Hemingway’s subtropical home in Key West that read as a disturbing return to defensive pretension by America’s liberal loners.
If this was the best we could picture for a future constrained by largely ignored but swiftly approaching catastrophes, then I was ready to cut my own legs off, stick myself into an urn, and call it a bouquet of a day. But I officially knew it was time to head out when I saw a tacky poster emblazoned with techy typeface reading: “HOW AI CONNECTS US TO NATURE.”
I passed by Eden on my way out and remembered that I had almost found therapeutic value in a largely superficial sensory landscape before my moment of meditation was disrupted by the reality of its context.
Pushing past the doors to the convention center, I was instantly hailed by a member of the Nature Conservancy looking for grassroots donations to tackle climate change via the nonprofit route.
“Are you out here today because of all the nature lovers funneling into the flower show?” I asked.
“Yeah, but you’d be surprised how few people have agreed to give to us today,” he replied. It might have been a tactic to get me on their newsletter, but I had no trouble believing him. Any disposable income was going to the Philly Flower Show’s gourmet garlic graters.
