The Philadelphia Flower Show announced that it is returning to the Convention Center, after two years outdoors at the FDR Park site in South Philadelphia. March 4 is the opening day of this year’s Flower Show.
The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) was smart enough to ask Helen Horstmann, of Lower Merion, to once again chair the Flower Show. This will be her fourth turn at the helm.
You have heard the adage about asking a busy person to do a complicated job. Well, Dr. Helen Horstmann is an orthopedic surgeon, who recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Medicine from Drexel University’s College of Medicine. She is an alumna of Rosemont College and the Medical College of Pennsylvania.
She has practiced medicine at CHOP, and a couple of other hospitals.
She has six daughters and 12 grandchildren and she was busy planting crocus bulbs in her garden the day we spoke on the phone. If you remember, as she and I do, the crocus display which spelled out “Springtime” on a lawn on Remington Road, some years ago, Dr. Horstmann spells out her children’s names in crocuses!
The Garden Electric is this year’s theme for the world’s largest indoor flower show, and it is bound to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world, not just around our region.
Matt Rader, the CEO of PHS and his team learned a lot from their two years at FDR Park in South Philly. In addition to bringing back favorites from prior years, they will be offering new events as well.
The monarch butterfly exhibit has always been one of my favorites, especially with our heightened awareness these days of the plight of those magnificent insects. Dr. Horstmann makes it a point to have butterfly bushes and milkweed bushes in her garden to offer feeding places for the migrating butterflies.
For younger visitors, there will be daily and nightly musical offerings by a group called SNACKTIME. I must confess I never heard of them, but Mayor Kenney was excited to learn that one of his favorite groups would be performing all week and selecting other musical groups to perform as well.
The Hamilton Horticourt, Dodo Hamilton’s legacy to the flower show, will once again feature the competition for the most amazing plants and flowers grown by individual plant-lovers. Now that Dodo has passed from the scene, Leslie Anne Miller and her sister Sarah Coulson have inherited the role of most-blue-ribbons-ever for their Barberry Botanicals entries.
Tickets are on sale now at the lowest and best prices. As a special holiday promotion, PHS will extend this offer through December 31, 2022. Single adult tickets are priced at $38.50 with additional best price options for students, children, and families. Tickets are available at tickets.phsonline.org.
I suspect that now, with much of COVID-19 in the rear-view window, the tickets will be selling out quite early. Try not to think about the awful snow storm some years ago which closed down the Flower Show and the entire city of Philadelphia in early March. Let us just think positively and plan for sunny and gorgeous weather March 4-12, 2023. The Garden Electric should warm all our hearts by then.
And the entrance garden, according to Dr. Horstmann, will be designed by Barbara King, the principal designer at Valley Forge Flowers, and it promises to be spectacular.
There will be lots of places to eat – and even to design flowered wreaths while you eat. Fido Friday will be back again so dog-lovers can bring their pets to visit the show. There will be something called the Kids Cocoon which will be designed to entertain kids. And Subaru will be the major presenter for the umpteenth year. Good corporate citizens!
Bonnie Squires is a communications consultant who writes weekly for Main Line Media News and can be reached at www.bonniesquires.com. She hosts the “Bonnie’s Beat” TV show at MLTV- MAIN LINE
