Flower show delights

This year's Portland Flower Show on March 8-12 at the Portland Company property was a definite improvement over last year's. Several local garden centers, missing from last year's show, were back, with lovely and instructive displays on the theme of All Around the World. We especially liked the increasing attention to educating customers, with plant matter carefully identified and staff available to explain cultural information. Some displays won numerous Flower Show awards, and Best of Show went to Seko's Garden Design of Buxton for a tea house in a Japanese moss garden with reflecting pool nearby.

Also winning several awards was O'Donal's Nursery of Gorham which recreated plantings at the Tower Hill Botanic Garden in Worcester, MA, using Cary Award-winning plants. This flowering cherry tree is readily grown in southern and coastal Maine, and to its right is a small Centennial magnolia--very early flowering, very hardy, eventually about 12 feet tall.
As usual, there was some stunning stone work, and one stoneworker was building walls and cutting stone in a fascinating exhibit. This arch and meditative stone plaza was created by Aronson stoneworks. The least satisfying feature of the flower show was the development of the theme All Around the World by some exhibits. A few included the kind of lush escapist tropics that many winter-weary show visitors came for; others looked unsatisfyingly like Maine gardens.