The Philadelphia Flower Show - Flowers, Flowers, and More Flowers

It's like one of those dreams you have in February…on a bleak day in late winter when the sky hangs heavy, a damp gray blanket that robs the world of color. You park beside a derelict warehouse. Coat wrapped tight, you rush through cement tunnels, hunched against the chill. And into the monstrous building. Shuffle along with a wintry mix of people and step through the wide doors and into a dream.

You are first met with a wash of curiously sweet air and suddenly all you see are flowers. Vertical walls of flowers and a wild, bright arch of flowers. Everywhere you look, flowers are massed in waves of brilliance and people’s faces lit with wonder in a magical land of flowers.

The Philadelphia Flower Show – acres of whimsical gardens, ten foot tall vases whose arrangements rise to fill the whole periphery of your vision. Flowers dripping from the ceiling. Flowering trees disguise the fact that you are indoors.

At the Philadelphia Flower Show you just might see

• The ruins of an old Irish abbey hidden in the green

• An ancient church where flowers fill the windows, mimicking stained glass

• A wedding venue that would make Bollywood blush at its extravagance

• A forest of bonsai

• 40 foot birch trees in full leaf

• Rhododendrons and azaleas in full bloom

• a heady scent as you stand in a forest whose floor is a carpet of hyacinths…a cloud comes over and it begins to snow

• Dappled shadows flicker with light as the sun returns

• a stream patters along moss covered rocks

• a low, full moon over a bayou with Spanish moss hanging from the branches of live oaks

• a country cottage in a glen with a wide wooden porch facing a meadow of wildflowers

• Orchids orchids orchids

Every year, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society hosts the Philadelphia Flower Show in late winter at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on 12th and Arch Streets.

2011's Flower Show will be called Springtime in Paris and will feature floral arrangements and designs by major florists, educational workshops, and show case gardens created by landscapers, organizations, and florists. The theme promises to suggest the gardens at Tuileries, the romantic opulence of Paris in days gone by, a visit to the famous Moulin Rouge (with music), and advant-guarde floral presentations.

Plenty of parking makes the Philadellphia Flower Show easy to visit and with China Town right nearby, great food is available after a long, arduous day.

The flower show stays with you. It follows you home! You'll ride home clutching a beautiful new pottery vase or a large bunch of interesting sticks. Last year I found red pussy willow with black catkins!

You will believe that you can transform your own back yard into a paradise, your appartment into a showplace.

And, next year, you will go back.