All bright eyes and bushy tales at Philly garden show

By the time the Philadelphia Flower Show closes Sunday, some 250,000 visitors will have passed under the glitzy entrance garden's floral homage to Hollywood, a display remarkable for its profligate use of calla lilies alone - I've never seen so many in one place.

The showgoers will have been transported to a Persian pavilion beckoning across a shimmering lake; to a spring terrain draped in fragrant flowering bulbs; to large, artsy floral arrangements inspired by Disney princesses.

But this oldest and largest of flower shows is as much about what folks are fleeing from as what they are flocking to. The floral spectacle at the Pennsylvania Convention Center offers a respite from winter, this year a season that has been desperately cold, snowy and clawing.

So it was somewhat ironic to find that one of the best of the major exhibits devoted half of its space to a winter landscape rendered bone white with the fake snow known as flocking, which, it turns out, can be applied through a pressurized nozzle or, with much more precision and fuss, manually. "We did it by hand," said Paul Hervey-Brookes, the young English designer behind the exhibit. "The machine is quite brutal." The gentle touch allowed for a more artistic layering of snow on a woodland floor and as a frosting on conifers. Perhaps it's the ambient warmth of the show floor, but the scene restores the poetry of a snowy landscape, so different from the real world of dirty snowbanks and potholes.

Hervey-Brookes, with hair that hints at a mohawk and wearing a thin-lapeled blue tweedy number, seemed as cool as his imagined world. Less than a week earlier, this had been just a patch of concrete on the floor of the cavernous convention center, but now it was a 1,000-square-foot fantasy realized.

The show's organizers, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, wanted allusions to Disney movies - and yes, there is an ice-stepped homage to "Frozen." For Hervey-Brookes this brief could mean only one motif: "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." He was entranced by a British television production of C.S. Lewis's children's story before Disney turned it into a movie, and the tale of four siblings moving from a comfortable English house through a dresser to the malevolent world of Narnia is exactly the type of yin-and-yang narrative that a garden designer is looking for.

Hence, the back half of his show garden is flocked white, and the front half is a verdant English flower border leading to a house. A grassy path takes the eye past a brick wall, along burgeoning birch trees and various flowers forced into bloom.

Although only 36, Hervey-Brookes has put together 14 major flower show displays around the world, including four at that super-trendy pinnacle of such events, the Chelsea Flower Show in London.

His main gig is as a designer of real gardens, prompting the question: What's the biggest difference between assembling a show landscape and the real thing?

"With the show garden you have to create the context and then make the garden," he said. "With a client's garden, the context exists, and you have to design the garden that fits in with it."

But in both instances the result is, in principle, similar: "Something that has identity and atmosphere. You're trying to create a story and a feeling."

There are techniques to achieve this. Standing on the grass path leading to his "house," Hervey-Brookes said that just as a photograph is about framing an image, so, too, are garden vistas about directing the eye. It's not just what you build, it's what you screen out.

Show gardens are rich in shaped views, so there is a glimpse of something on each side of an exhibit.

There is another fundamental difference between instant show gardens, which must grab your attention and hold it, and real ones, which are inherently installed in an immature state.

Hervey-Brookes says the mindset of the garden-show visitor is this: The initial notion is that you're going to see show gardens, but once you hop into the car, the mentality shifts: What are you going to buy at the show, and where are you going to eat?

"The gardens have to draw them back into what they were coming to see," he said.

Across the aisle, Australian landscape designer Jim Fogarty had created another world, but with similar ideas of corralling views while shaping a story. In this case, it's a survivalist's steel bunker repurposed from a hulking fuel storage tank. The living area features a wall-mounted TV, speakers and a recliner fashioned from a dentist's chair.

The tropical vegetation - including bottlebrush and eucalyptus trees - suggests an Outback wilderness where nature is struggling against an arid environment. The storyline? In a dystopian world, a guy has retreated to the bush to create a verdant redoubt against a world turned hostile to humans and plants alike. "It's a bit of a bloke-y garden, it's masculine but it's not just aimed at men," Fogarty said. "It's about the importance of plants and how we need to preserve them for the future."

Fogarty, 44, has done shows in many other places, including Sydney, London, Singapore, Japan and his hometown of Melbourne. But the flower show in Philadelphia has brought him to the United States for the first time.

He said he finds people in Philadelphia open and friendly, and he has consumed too much winter comfort food. "I love the hoagies, the Philly cheesesteaks, and the Reading Terminal Market is just amazing," he said, referring to the adjacent landmark food market. "If I lived here, I would be massive."

Talking with him under the spotlights of the convention center (oddly gloomy and glaring at the same time), I am unsettled by the fact that Fogarty has a strange complexion. Then I realize it's his tan - he left a summertime in Melbourne where the temperatures were in the 90s.

Outside, it was about 20 degrees. No wonder he built a bunker. "This is the coldest I've ever experienced," he said. "I have never seen so much snow."