Make Way for Spring

According to thousands of Pennsylvanians, spring arrives March 16, exactly six weeks after a groundhog in Chester Valley Knoll sees his own shadow and crawls back into his hole. According to astronomers, who gaze at the vernal equinox and not the infernal snow, spring will burst forth at 8:53 p.m. March 20. But to millions of U.S. gardeners, spring officially begins the minute they stroll through the local flower show and receive their newest seed catalogue--and many of them have.

In Milwaukee, nearly 100,000 people recently walked out of snow and subfreezing temperatures straight into a lush garden where a stone Saint Francis of Assisi stood by a gurgling waterfall and fields of flowering forsythia and geraniums. In Kansas City, Mo., the theme was "A Circus of Flowers," with a candy-striped circus tent summoning up a gay, summer air. For the opening of Cleveland's 23rd show, neither blizzards nor bone-chilling winds sweeping off of ice-covered Lake Erie could deter 18,000 hardy hobbyists. And in Detroit, while huge blocks of ice floated down the river near by, the crowds packed so tightly into cavernous Cobo Hall that the fire marshal finally had to bar the doors.

"Eats Hamburger!" Biggest kickoff for the new season is still New York's International Flower Show, which last week attracted some 300,000 flower lovers, who paraded through the Coliseum for the first, if fleeting, glimpse of spring. More than ever, it was a strange hybrid of beauty and banality, a midsummer's daydream constantly interrupted by nightmares. Lush gardens with brooks and splitlog benches, dogwood trees and primrose bushes delighted the enchanted while only a whiff away peddlers hawked scented sachets and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The New York Botanical Garden's 500-ft. tropical rain garden, adorned with a climbing cissus vine and rock pool, was back to back with Woolworth's counter, where salesgirls touted 880 packages of Venus Fly Trap, billed as "Nature's Magic Toy," which "Catches insects! Eats hamburger!" At the huge Kodak garden there were nervous flamingos and the Kodak "Smile Girl," who gradually wilted as she tried to keep her cheeks puffed and her lips curled upwards for half an hour at a time. Still, hundreds of people thought she was pretty as a picture. By the end of each day, the garden was edged with a border of discarded blue flashbulbs.

In the festival rites, fanciers could weed out the poppies from the poppycock. Side by side, split-nailed suburban housewives and well-manicured Manhattan matrons, as well as a surprising number of camera-toting men, strolled through the better commercial displays, ooohing, aaahing, envying and inquiring. "They must have a secret!" exclaimed one housewife in front of a tub of Golden Wine roses. "Ah, geraniums! I love them because they are so hardy!" said another.

Sniffed & Scrutinized. At the Rutgers-Cornell research center, people brought samples of spotted leaves and soil specimens, flooded the information booth with questions. Sample: How do you keep your neighbor's dog out of the tulip patch? The Rutgers student's wry reply: "Good fences make good nosegays." At the Burpee Co.'s seed counter, pretty salesgirls showed off the new topper snapdragons, which now come in every shade from lavender to orange. Other new seeds for the season: Burpee's new two-tone Whirligig zinnias and a Yellow Nugget marigold (see color pages), a large bloomer meant to last from Memorial Day to after Labor Day. At Jackson & Perkins, people sentimentalized over last year's John F. Kennedy rose, craned to see the company's newest offerings--a red rose named Mexicana, whose petals turn to silver near the stem, and a bright new floribunda, Apricot Nectar.

All but invisible to the show's patrons is the hard-nosed business that goes into every new bloom. With 44 million U.S. gardeners spending an estimated $5 billion each year on everything from peat moss to chamois-colored gloves with green thumbs, companies such as Jackson & Perkins and Burpee begin years in advance to cross-fertilize flowers to achieve the blend of color, size and hardiness to captivate this spring's buyer. To produce a new hybrid, employees brush pollen individually onto the pistils of 10,000 roses, consider themselves lucky if three of the resulting 100,000 seedlings seem worth cultivating. The Mexicana rose cost $50,000, not an extravagant expenditure if only 1% of the nation's 35 million rose growers buy one.

Ice Trays & Plastic Bottoms. Most of the country's flowers--and many of its newest varieties--are developed by wholesalers who cater solely to the burgeoning number of suburban garden markets. Among the new leaders is Vaughan's Seed Co., which quit the mail-order business four years ago, now grosses $10 million, as compared to Burpee's $7,000,000. Vaughan's flies pollen all the way from Guatemala to fertilize flowers in California, buys tulips from Holland, begonias from Belgium, amaryllis from Africa.

A change is also under way to tidy up the practice of gardening, make it as simple and antiseptic as picture taking. Begonias now come ready to bloom in individual paperboard containers, geraniums can be bought in plastic bedding boxes that look like oversized ice trays. Both the plant and its cube-shaped root cluster can simply be pulled out of the pots, plopped into the ground. Rose bushes arrive in brand-new aluminum foil containers with plastic bottoms; the backyard gardener simply snaps off the plastic bottom, lowers the container into the ground without ever soiling his hands. Because rose roots grow straight down, to all practical purposes, the foil foils them not at all.

Not that the beauty of the flowers at flower shows depends completely on chemists, horticulturists and hybridizers. The fact of the matter is that insects do not like wallflowers either, and if a bloom does not lure them with its looks and fragrance, the chances are that the blossom will not get pollinated or reproduce. Even before Burpee, it has been the survival of the fairest.

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