Every February, garden shows open all across America, and for the landscape designers who build the show gardens, it's a rare moment on the big public stage. I think back on our displays with Classic Nursery & Landscape Company (now Classic Landscaping) at the NW Flower & Garden Show in Seattle — theatrical gardens we built every other year rather than annually, our last in 2006. Spacing them out let us spend more than a year digging into a concept, pulling in artists, suppliers, and volunteers, and really having some fun with it.
Why take on a show garden at all? For most designers, it's a chance to put their name in front of the public — and to feel part of a larger creative community.
That's true enough, but for us it's been more about pushing design boundaries and learning more about history and the craft.
This part is inside baseball for landscape designers and contractors, but it’s the part of the show most visitors never see — and it’s where a show garden is really won or lost. Over the years we settled on six rules:
1. If you're in it, make a big statement.
2. Bring in a creative partner from outside horticulture — someone who can teach you something new.
3. Plan it carefully, from concept to teardown.
4. Promote it shamelessly.
5. Line up suppliers and donated materials.
6. Follow up with everyone who showed interest.
Planning means breaking the exhibit into manageable pieces: walls, plants, hardscape, artwork, printed materials, and so on.
Promotion means brochures, handouts, social posts, mailings, and portfolio displays.
Staging is the careful choreography — laying everything out in advance so the garden goes together fast and the big deliveries land in the right order.
Setup is where it all happens, with careful scheduling of labor and materials.
Staffing can make or break a show that runs all day for a week or more — you want your best people there at the busiest times.
Breakdown matters too — everything has to be packed up, wrapped, and put back into containers.
Some of what goes on behind the scenes: get help — remember Tom Sawyer's fence? Bring in local suppliers, nurseries, craftsmen, carpenters, and masons. Ask for plant and material donations in exchange for a display card. Put together an email about your "team." Ask the local community college horticulture program for volunteers. And once the show opens, keep brochures, a signup clipboard, cleaning and watering supplies, a phone charger, and everyone's phone number close at hand — things get messy, and this is one garden that won't last very long. Take lots of pictures.
(Our past NW Flower & Garden Show exhibits with Classic Nursery & Landscape Company include "La Palabra Pintada / The painted word," created in collaboration with Monrovia and New York Times bestselling author and artist Nick Bantock, in a tropicalissimo style with a subtext of botanical dyes; "The Millennium Railway," built with the assistance of The Puget Sound Garden Railway Society as a plant world in miniature; "Mirabilia / A garden of Arthurian legend," produced with the help of The Seattle Knights and centered on botanicals and medieval belief; and our 2004 Best of Show winner, "Portage to the Pacific," a garden of memorabilia from Lewis & Clark's Corps of Discovery, made entirely of plants from Lewis's journals.)
These days, our show days are behind us — but the gardens live on in photographs, and in everything they taught us about design. If you go to the show, look for the stories behind the plants. That's where the real garden is.
