Garden Club Readies for Flower Show Competition

The Moorestown Garden Club is preparing  its entry for this year’s Philadelphia International Flower Show.

Entered in the Urn Division, the club will design an arrangement for an urn that stands 28 inches high and is 34 inches round.

“The club enters the show every other year,” explained Cathy Huffman, of the Garden Club. The Philadelphia Horticultural Society, which puts on the Flower Show, places applicants in divisions.

The Garden Club will incorporate the Flower Show’s theme, Springtime in Paris, into its design.

“We thought about French artists and then decided on Monet,” Huffman explained. While “mille fleur” or a thousand flowers is a popular French art concept, the Garden Club team decided that the urn will actually feature about 20 different varieties of flowers.

“We wanted flowers that bloom in the springtime in Paris,” said Stacy Schaffer, another Garden Club member who is participating in the contest. The flowers will be mostly purple, white and yellow with splashes of pink, according to Schaffer.

The team traveled recently to Meadowbrook Farms in Pennsylvania to choose the flowers. On Friday morning, they will pick up the blooms, which are being forced into early bloom by Meadowbrook. The women will assemble the urn on site at the Pennsylvania Convention Center Friday afternoon for judging on Saturday and again on Wednesday.

“Two different sets of judges will award ribbons and comments,” explained Schaffer. The Moorestown Garden Club has won its share of blue ribbons in the past, and individual members of the club also regularly compete and win.

The centerpiece of this year’s design is a bridge that will be placed among the flowers in the urn. It is meant to mimic a bridge that was located at Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny. It was depicted in Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies, painted in 1889. The Garden Club bridge is constructed of rebar and painted green to match the original bridge.

“We want the urn to present what you might see walking across the bridge in Monet’s gardens,” Schaffer said.

In a bit of serendipity, Huffman is having construction work done at her house and her contractor helped make and secure the bridge.

The two women say Friday can’t come soon enough.

“We’re anxious,” admitted Huffman. “We haven’t actually seen all of the plants, so when we pick them up on Friday, that will be the first time we see everything together.”

The Philadelphia International Flower Show will take place March 6-13 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, 12th and Arch streets in Philadelphia. Tickets are available online at theflowershow.com.