Usually, the only pots you hear about at the Flower Show are the kind you plant stuff in. Today, though, melting pot came to mind as I looked at and listened to the visitors. We were moving around the show like a multicultural scrum, and there they were: Amish, Muslims and Hasidic Jews, ladies from the Red Hat Society, the young, the old, all kinds and colors of people cruising around, inching along in walkers and rolling by in wheelchairs. There are exceptions to every rule, but just about everyone likes flowers and you can see that everywhere you look here.
I walked by the Camden City Garden Club's exhibit - club members run the Camden Children's Garden - just as a tiny pair of pink sneakers disappeared into the stem of a fanciful toadstool in the exhibit, whose theme is "A child's imagination - faeries in the garden." You have to look closely to see the tiny faerie houses built into tree stumps and to imagine how, in faerie lore, tulips served as beds for babies. I know, you laugh and think this is all a bunch of hooey. But I am surprising myself. I loved these little faerie beds, and the faerie homes built into the landscape of the Ealain Wood (in photo, along with tiny clothesline), which you see through the flower-filled portal coming into the exhibition hall.
People are oohing and ahhing over these features. All kinds of people. That's one of the reasons I like coming here. No matter what you do for a living, whether you're a woman of a certain age who favors red hats, whatever your faith or feelings, and even if you're a Very Important Person, if you're here, you're just like me and everyone else. You love flowers.
As a P.S. as I sign off for today, I want to introduce you to Paula Amand (in photo), a tiny lady who has been selling bulbs as H. B. Co. from Grand Island, N.Y., at the Philadelphia Flower Show for 50 years. (She's been married to Adolphe for half a century, too.) They'll be honored on Wednesday by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which puts on the show. Adolphe is ill and stayed home this year, but Paula soldiers on.
Asked what's changed in five decades of selling bulbs at the show, she shrugs."Taste in bulbs doesn't change. Bulbs are bulbs," she said. "Just like people are people." I think she meant to say: Flower People.
