By Debbie Teashon
Bring your napkins because this year’s signature Northwest garden show will put your mouth into drool mode. Where else can you join in on “A Taste of Spring” celebration of food, the latest trends in organic gardening, the spring scents from the gardens, and an assortment of culinary experiences? It’s all under the same roof of the second largest flower and garden event in the nation: Northwest Flower & Garden Show in Seattle, at the Washington State Convention Center, Feb. 22-26, 2017.
You would have to cross the continent to find another show that rivals this garden event. It is the place to meet up with your fellow garden friends from around the Northwest with many Portlanders in the crowd.
The heart of the Northwest Flower and Garden Show is the display gardens. Using the “Taste of Spring” theme, the 22 gardens promise to show some serious, mouth-watering garden designs during the last throes of winter, with the gardens making spring a reality.
The gardens take a lot of preparation before they are perched on top of the convention center’s concrete floor. Garden designers and landscape companies bring their talents together to create astonishing garden rooms that inspire and excite their viewers.
One garden designer Sue Goetz is a veteran of the show. She’s designed eight gardens, starting back in 2004.
“I like to think I know what I’m doing, but every design has its challenges.” Goetz said. She knows what it takes to make a great garden, it starts with sketches on paper when inspiration strikes and concludes with building the garden from the floor up.
“You don’t just dig a hole in the dirt,” Goetz said. “You literally have to build the earth to plant in.”
Goetz has worked in collaboration with others over the years. One of her favorite garden installations for the show was a collaboration with her daughter: “The Art of Retreat” in 2014. Their garden won several awards: a gold medal, Sunset Magazine’s Western Living Award, and the Fine Gardening Magazine Award. The mother-daughter team pulled together two design requirements and successfully melded them into one garden.
This year, Goetz is working for Father Nature Landscapes as the garden designer. The company will take Goetz’s design for a “Mid-Mod-Mad…It’s Cocktail Hour!” garden and make it a reality.
The first step is coming up with a concept. Goetz roughly pencils it out as the ideas come into her head, and then the finished design is turned over to show organizers for approval or rejection.
Once the design is approved, the designers and landscapers pull in the materials necessary to make it happen. Builders make sheds and arbors, while plants and accesories are ordered. Most of the flowers are forced into bloom for the proper planting time at the show.
This year, Goetz’s design comes straight out of the 1950 and ’60s, an era when the Rat Pack (Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr. and others) ruled entertainment. Some of the design is inspired by the 1968 and 1969 Sunset Books, “Garden Patio Building.”
“I really fell in love with midcentury design.” Sue said. This year she threw the idea of the television show “Mad Men” in the garden to the landscape team. With the show theme of “Taste of Spring,” she was challenged to marry the two and came up with cocktails in the garden. The team grabbed the idea and ran with it.
Clean lines of the era called for huge geometric containers built into stonewalls that surround the perimeter of the garden. The design and landscape team will fill the pottery with herbs and edible plants – anything edible that is used in cocktails and mixers. Lemon trees, blueberries, rosemary and lemon grass are just a few plants that will fill the garden.
“You name an herb, we will probably have it in the garden,” Goetz said. “I’m planting anything to flavor cocktails with. I’ll have cocktail recipes for the herbs that we actually have in the planters in fliers for people to take home or they can scan a barcode.” Goetz plans to include recipes such as lime margaritas with a twist and mint juleps.
The garden design also includes a meadow of sedge (Carex testacea), and flowers such as Narcissus ‘Jetfire’ underneath Himalayan birches. An unusual cantilevered pergola built by Father Nature Landscapes will hang over the dining area. Burnt orange and avocado green, popular midcentury colors, are seen in accents such as pillows. All the furnishings are true to the era.
Other gardens in the works at the show are “A Victory Garden” with a twist of a formal knot garden and historic elements from early in the 20th century. With garden display titles such as “Honey! We Shrunk the Farm” ” Villa Primavera — A Retreat Inspired by the Amalfi Coast” or “Blooming Abundance,” the show has an array of gardens to fit many design preferences.
The show promises 100 free seminars on diverse topics that will help homeowners realize their garden dreams. Ideas from these talks will include how to prune, DIY decor for outdoor entertaining, and creating curb appeal. Garden designers, garden writers, even a professor, or two will walk you through the steps to better gardening.
A popular part of the show is watching teams of local celebrities and gardeners join in “Garden Wars,” a reality competition. A new addition to the show is “Container Wars,” another reality-show-style competition for best-planted containers.
New for 2017 is a taste sampling of specialty foods and beverages in the “Tasting Corner,” which ties in seamlessly with the garden show theme. Vendors from across the Northwest will have samples of their specialty foods. If you have an adventurous palette, or are just hungry after touring the gardens, you will want to graze your way through this section.
For more information on the show, visit www.gardenshow.com
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