The Flower Show must go on: Crews start setting up for Philly Flower Show despite snow and years of weather curses

Inside a large exhibition room at the Pennsylvania Convention Center Monday morning, where workers are setting up next week’s Philadelphia Flower Show, one could be fooled into believing that spring has somehow arrived early in Philly.

The scent of mulch permeates every corner, tendrils of pink and red flowers are delicately laid over massive tree trunks, a mobile hanging from the ceiling dangles dozens of iridescent butterfly cutouts over the floor, and bright green shrubbery dots the halls. It seems as if Punxsutawney Phil maybe got it wrong this time.

But one thing gives it away: the gaping open loading dock door ushering in a channel of 35-degree air that slices through the center of the exhibition hall. Clusters of snowflakes billow in toward a mint-colored wooden fence and a tree house.

For the organizers of the Philadelphia Flower Show, an annual week and a half-long event that features dozens of horticultural exhibits, the 14-inch snow dump over the weekend was less than ideal, said Seth Pearsoll, the show’s creative director and vice president with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. But it wasn’t a surprise.

“We have been watching the weather for weeks on end,” Pearsoll said. “You just got to stay on top of it.”

The show, which starts Feb. 28 and ends March 8, is typically held in the late winter/early spring. That’s led to some historically dicey weather. A 1993 blizzard forced the show to close early. Meteorologists predicted huge snowfalls in 2001 and 2013 as well. And, in 2018, a nor’easter hit the city on the opening night of the show. When the show was held outside during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was shuttered or postponed for short stretches due to inclement weather.

Despite the weather challenges the show, which has been running for nearly 200 years, is typically held at this time of year partly due to tradition. The show dates back to an era long before the internet when the event was designed to present the season’s products to florists, landscapers, farmers, and others in the horticultural industry so they could place their orders in time for spring planting.

“After that it was just part of the DNA of the show,” Pearsoll said.

The show brings in about a quarter million visitors each year, he said, and requires meticulous planning and constant pivoting.

The original schedule for Monday included a 7 a.m. load in time, he said, but his team later pushed that to noon to ensure all the trucks could get to the facility safely. Many of the plant deliveries for Monday were moved to Tuesday or Wednesday, by which time the team hopes the roads will be clearer. Trucks won’t just be contending with the weather in Philly but across the country as the event is getting shipments in from Minnesota, Florida, and New York, among other states.

Most of the plants themselves are protected in climate-controlled trucks.

“I think, for me, having been a part of outdoor shows, having worked a million flower shows, weather is always a thing,” he said. “So I’ve really come to see it as just another one of those planning variables in the event industry.”

The way he views it, the snowy, slushy, frigid weather outside enhances the magic of walking through rows of plants that have, through “sorcery,” as he calls it, been manipulated into blooming out of season.

“It’s this crazy thing, right?” he said. “It mean it’s science. It’s art.”