What Happens to the Flowers After the Flower Show?

If you braved the nor’easter and visited the Philadelphia Flower Show last week, you definitely treated yourself. The show was themed around Holland and featured some 60,000 tulips as well as bikes with flower planters and thousands of other blooms. There were 6,000 tulips hanging upside down over the entrance, as well as buds of all colors celebrating the national flower of Holland.

The hanging Entrance Garden was a gorgeous display of flowers. Those tulips are destined for a second life.

Thinking about all these flowers begs the question – what happens to all the blooms when the show is over? It would be both an aesthetic shame and a crime against Mother Nature to just callously dispose of the plants. That’s why it’s good to know that many of the buds are going to be re-purposed throughout the city.

Some of the event’s most famous flowers, the Entrance Garden tulips, will be on sale for members of the Philadelphia Horticultural Society on Saturday, March 25 at Meadowbrook Farm in Jenkintown. In fact, the PHS will be using lots of flowers to redecorate their beer gardens and displays around town. One example, as per the Philadelphia Curbed site, is “the one at the foot of the Rail Park and another at 16th and South.”

Not all the plants belonged to the Society. Those belonging to outside gardeners and distributors went back safely home with them to be transplanted, sold, or used in their own work.

The small amount of blooms that aren’t being recycled will be composted, so at least their fates will benefit nature in the end.

And the Benjamin Franklin Parkway will soon be alive with a riot of floral color, as the PHS planted some 20,000 tulip bulbs before the Flower Show.

The 2017 Flower Show may just have ended, but it’s not too soon to be thinking about the fun we’ll all have next year. The 2018 show will be titled “Wonders of Water” and will run from March 3 to 11 of next year.