As I sit down to write this, it is sunny and warm. The calendar says it is officially spring. The ground is covered in more mud than snow. However, I cannot help but feel that all of this is a lie. Tomorrow's forecast calls for snow, and most of the past couple weeks have looked like this:
In the midst of all that snowiness, it seemed like the perfect time to get a little preview of spring. So while my husband took my oldest skiing (re:snow), my mom and the little ones and I headed up to the Champlain Valley Exposition fairgrounds in Essex Junction for the Vermont Flower Show.
What is a Flower Show?
I grew up in Vermont, and my whole family is involved in their agriculture industry, so I feel like I have been to most of the Farm Shows, grazing conferences, and the like that the state has to offer. I had, however, never been to this one and it was such a treat.
If you, like me, aren't familiar with this type of flower show, the basic idea is like this:
gardeners and landscape companies layout and build a massive indoor (out of season) garden
vendors gather, selling everything from landscaping services and flower seeds, to artisan products.
visitors stroll through and enjoy all there is to see
The Garden
The theme this year was Winnie the Pooh and the 100 Acre Wood, which felt very whimsical and pretty perfect for my two year old. As you moved through the landscape, you passed all of Pooh Bear's friends' houses, and some other familiar settings from his stories.
Everything was covered with hundreds (thousands?) of forced tulips, pansies, and flowering trees. It really was like skipping 2 1/2 months into the future. There is nothing like flowers to make you feel like life is coming back after winter.
Vendors and What I Found
While I was excited to see all of the flowers, I was also hoping that I might be able to score some of the specialty dahlia tubers that I was trying to snag from the tuber sales (namely Jowey Winnie). I did find one farm selling fancy tubers, but they only had varieties I had already purchased. Lest you think I walked away empty-handed, I found an absolute steal on some hardware store type dahlias. They may not be trendy, but I am still really excited to see them bloom.
I must confess that I got my first ever bunch of ranunculus. We are actually growing these at our borrowed field in New Hampshire this year, but I had never actually seen them outside of the curated grids of Instagram. They were so pretty, and the vase life was amazing, even after the abuse of a 3 hour drive home out of water. To say I am excited for mine to flower would be an understatement.
Take-Away
I was definitely intrigued by the popularity of pussy willow. There were multiple people selling bunches, and nearly everyone I saw seemed to be carrying one. My parents have one pussy willow, and I worked with it once last spring for an event, but now I am researching adding some trees to my property.
All in all, this was an awesome outing. It only took a couple hours at the show, so if you were visiting one nearer to you (this was a ways from me!), it would be easy to squeeze into a morning or an afternoon.
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