PHILADELPHIA
IT feels like Walt Disney World at the Pennsylvania Convention Center as Natura, a giant goddess draped in evergreens and vines, reclines in her gardens of fire, wind and water, and Floratopia, a life-size fake tree covered with fragrant flowers, comes to life at the nation's most prestigious flower show.
"Enchanted Spring: A Tribute to Mother Nature," the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's 177th Philadelphia Flower Show, opens on 10 acres inside the Convention Center here on Sunday. Since 1829, when a red-leafed Mexican poinsettia starred in the first exhibition, the flower show has wowed visitors with the rare and unusual and exquisite. But this year fantasy is upstaging horticulture.
Sam Lemheney, the show's designer, spent 12 years at Disney's Orlando, Fla., location, first pruning plants in the Magic Kingdom, then managing flower and garden festivals and designing film shoots. Mr. Lemheney studied horticulture at the University of Delaware. But a college internship at the Magic Kingdom left him with "pixie dust coming out of my ears," he said, so after graduation, he headed back to Orlando. "The whole show aspect and entertaining all the visitors really appealed to me," he said. "I had found my niche."
A Philadelphia native, Mr. Lemheney returned two years ago to work alongside the show's former designer, Ed Lindemann. This year, Mr. Lemheney is steering the show boat — not that 4,000 volunteers and the growers and designers of 50 major exhibits don't have strong opinions.
"I wanted to do something completely different, something more whimsical and interpretive," Mr. Lemheney, 38, said on Feb. 27, as bucket trucks sculptured a mountain of mulch beneath Natura, her sphinx-like smile hovering 25 feet above a concrete floor.
"I thought Mother Nature would be a great character, since she plays a role in all that we do here," he added. (Which is true, if you have ever tried to force a cherry tree to bloom in March.)Mr. Lemheney, who has the youthful, positive air of someone who never left Never Land, had to get this $6.2 million show up in 10 days (though its growers and designers got a one-year jump). If this year's extravaganza is as successful as last year's, it will draw 250,000 visitors and reap around $1 million for Philadelphia Green, the society's urban gardening arm.
Mr. Lemheney stood beneath the craggy branches of Floratopia, a chicken wire confection with a 35-foot-wide canopy wrapped in muslin, mosses and raffia. Soon it would fill out with clouds of fragrant orchids, freesias, lilies and other blossoms.
Call it Mr. Lemheney's tree of life — or his escalator. People are still asking about the one in the old civic center, which would carry them magically out of winter and down into an emerald paradise crammed with tulips, azaleas, foxgloves and giant sunflowers, all blooming impossibly together.
"How do we duplicate that awesome feeling?" Mr. Lemheney asked. Well, you don't. But this is pretty good if you like special effects and fantastic plants grouped in joyfully unnatural ways.
Replacing the escalator will be Floratopia's scented canopy echoing with the songs of birds and frogs.
"The sound is piped in, " Mr. Lemheney acknowledged.
He ducked under the tree and into the area where the goddess's gardens were under mad construction. A little blue house with aquariums for windows rose out of a lake dancing with fountains; a fence of blue silk waved in a "wild" meadow blown by hidden fans.
The fire garden, a mound of mulch with a 12-foot turret, was evolving into a volcano with the help of Jack Blandy, the owner of Stoney Bank Nurseries in Glen Mills, Pa., and his son, Joe, a landscape architect, who sat behind the wheel of a front-end loader trying to push a thousand-pound rock from his personal collection up the mulch slope. Soon they would be adding fiery-colored tropical plants: crotons, cordylines, coleuses, bromeliads, blood bananas. "Moving lights will make them look like lava," Mr. Blandy said. Enormous blue-gray agaves loomed out of black mondo grass: the volcano's charred remains (get it?).
I don't know about the fiery tropicals, but I'd love to transport those agaves and that mondo grass to my own garden. Which is the idea, of course; letting go of reality for a few hours could give a dirt gardener a little inspiration.
The trees-in-waiting that caught my eye included Covey, a rare weeping redbud, set in the wild meadow, that could be the centerpiece of an urban garden. Nearby was Poncirus trifoliata, one of those spiky Japanese hardy orange trees, which could be planted in numbers as a hedge or used as a single abstract sculpture.
But fabulous plants, it seems, are no longer enough. "Sam has brought animation and movement to the show," Mr. Blandy said. "When people see the jumping waters and aquariums in the windows, they're going to go crazy."
Mr. Lemheney said: "We're competing with other shows, TV, the Internet, computer games. People want special effects." (Will we have an alligator lagoon in a survivors' garden next year?) "Excuse me," Mr. Blandy said suddenly. "I see a nightmare about to happen."
He sprinted over to the water garden, where a piece of the pond house had just floated off. Meanwhile, Natura was emerging nicely from the mulch. Joe Stitt, a member of the installation team from J. Franklin Styer Nurseries in Concordville, Pa., was readying two pines, with soft needles, for the goddess's shapely breasts. "We wanted something round," Mr. Stitt said, not "the Madonna cone look."
Lest you worry about all the fantasy, there will be plenty of learning opportunities. The American Horticultural Society is erecting a Green Garage, for example, to showcase environmentally friendly fertilizers, pesticides and tools. And then there are the competitive classes for the 3,000-plus amateur growers, whose pet daffodils and clivias vie for best in show. This year, visitors will be invited to judge a selection of spectacular plants, just to get a sense of the difficult art of growing — and judging.