Flower Show

At the last minute a brilliant red, yellow & blue macaw by the name of Toto slipped from his cage in the stately Georgian garden of Florist John T. Scheepers, flew into Alfred Kottmiller's Japanese garden and began furiously to gobble all the blossoms in sight. There was a brief moment of hysteria in the Wisteria; Toto was returned to his cage; a Navy band assisted by a soprano performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and New York's Flower Show was declared open.

Once a year New Yorkers, who must live and work in one of the most barren cities on the continent, may go to Grand Central Palace to see such gardens and such flowers as never grew in the open air. Over 25,000 flower-lovers went there the opening day. The gardens and flowers were provided not only by garden clubs and nurserymen but by some of the greatest names in U. S. finance: John Pierpont Morgan, Sidney Zollicoffer Mitchell, George Fisher Baker, Mrs. Payne Whitney, Hiram Edward Manville, Otto Hermann Kahn.

For the second year in succession the solid gold shield of the Holland Bulb Exporters Association went to Marshall Field for a bulb garden arranged by his able superintendent, George H. Gillies. Flaming tulips lined a green turf path to a stone bench by a mellow brick wall shaded by flowering lilac, rhododendrons, laurel, dogwood.

Other gardens were there to suit every taste: a tropical pool; two Alpine gardens complete with rocks and running brooks; Japanese gardens with twisted pine trees, thatch-roofed tea houses. All week long crowds of curious Easterners milled about the desert garden of Robert F. Manda where more than 1,000 varieties of weird misshapen cacti were growing in sand and rocks. Fourth day of the show the crowd grew even thicker. The "Crown of Thorns," a rare silver-grey prickle bush brought from Palestine by Cactus-grower Manda 25 years ago, had suddenly burgeoned with dozens of brilliant red flowers. Only once in three or four years does the Crown of Thorns bloom, hardly ever at this season, never before at the New York Flower Show.

Largest exhibit of the main floor was the Georgian garden of Florist Scheepers. Here were pink blossoming peach trees, dogwood, lilac and tulips, a brick-lined lily pool, and on the iron trellised porch of a white brick Georgian house with peacock blue blinds, Macaw Toto in his cage. A brilliant example of the art of landscape architecture was not Mr. Scheepers' only contribution to the show. From his greenhouses came two new flowers never before exhibited in the U. S., the Sweet Glad and the Glory-of-the-Sun.

Glory-of-the-Sun--Leucocoryne ixioides odorata to botanists--is an entirely new species of bulbous plant discovered high in the Andes two years ago in the course of an expedition conducted by British Botanist Clarence Elliott. The flowers, in groups of five and six on a single slender stem, are lily shaped, purplish blue shading to white, and have a penetrating sweet odor. Their discovery was not particularly difficult. Botanist Elliott looked out of his bedroom window in a little Andean village one morning, saw a bucketful of the blooms for sale in the market. He dug up bulbs, took them to England, planted them in the greenhouse of Baron Lionel Nathan de Rothschild. Glory-of-the-Suns were first exhibited at last year's flower show in London. Mr. Scheepers believes Glory-of-the-Sun will grow in California, the South, anywhere that freesias can be grown.

Plant breeders have done many curious things to the gladiolus. But the Sweet Glad, other Scheepers innovation, is the first gladiolus to be given a smell.

On the upper floors of the Flower Show, humbler gardeners competed with individual plants, tested their artistic skill in contests for flower arrangements. On the second day reporters paused for a moment before a marble Empire vase arranged "in the French manner" by Mrs. Lewis F. Frissell. The evening before her explorer son Varick was reported lost in the explosion of the sealing ship Viking (TIME, March 23).

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