Perennial Plant Association: the garden tours (part 1)

 I would be terrified to let these people see my garden.

This horde was one of the tour groups for the Perennial Plant Association's national symposium in late July, a gathering of "green industry" professionals that included wholesale growers, garden center retailers, landscape architects, garden designers, garden writers, and garden bloggers like me.  The gardens below were part of Wednesday's design/landscape tour, featuring five different private gardens that differed greatly in size, character, and style.  The photos below represent only a small fraction of the several hundred I took; for the rest, check out my Perennial Plant Association album on Flickr.  I'll do a separate blog post about the Friday tours, which were great in an entirely different way.

Five days of plant geek pleasure

For five days in late July, I convinced myself and everybody around me that I was (a) a morning person and (b) an extrovert, neither of which is remotely true.  It takes a pretty special event to pull off a stunt like that, and that was the Perennial Plant Association's 2015 national symposium in Baltimore.  Every time I think about distilling five very busy, very intense, and overwhelmingly pleasurable days into one blog post, I get slightly dizzy.  Instead, I've broken it into two blog posts. In this one I'll give my general impressions of the event, and I'll follow up in a few days with the gardens we saw on the tours.

MANTS, part 2

[Second of two parts.  For part one see: Beating the winter blahs at MANTS.]

After the morning media reception, I braced myself to go out on the show floor.  Have I used the word "overwhelming" too many times already?  "Intense" might be more accurate: it's a lot to take in all at once but how often do I find myself surrounded by an entire convention center full of plants, plant-related stuff, and best of all, people who can (and will) talk about plants all day long?  But I was only in Baltimore for the day, so I had to see everything.  Everything.  Where to start?

Beating the winter blahs at MANTS

Coconut palm, MANTS show floor

[For my coverage of MANTS 2014, see "The Masterpiece of Trade Shows™"]

[Update: In response to my comment about an apparent lack of recycling bins, I received this comment from Kelly Finney, Event Manager for MANTS: "The Baltimore Convention Center has a single stream trash program, so they have a combination of containers for mixed use and also for separating.  At the end of the show on Friday, I actually met a couple of the guys who sort the trash... talk about a thankless job.  The convention center has compactor, baler, compost program, pallet recycling and the disposable utensils are primarily corn plastic.  Here is more from their website about their green initiatives: Green Matters"  Many thanks to Kelly for the additional information!]

"Overwhelming" was the word I found myself using more than once to describe MANTS, the Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show held last week in Baltimore, Maryland.   Now in its 45th year, MANTS occupies the Baltimore Convention Center for 3 days every January.  Drawing nearly 1,000 exhibitors and more than 10,000 attendees, and filling the entire convention center floor, this is one of the biggest trade shows of its kind, attended by a huge cross-section of the horticulture industry, and a major event on the horticultural calendar.  I spent all day Thursday at MANTS and was only able to scratch the surface.  By the end of the day I was exhausted, but in the best possible way.  This was exactly what I needed in mid-winter: coming just when my gardening spirits are at their lowest, the event was like a euphoric and exhilarating drug that really helped pull me out of the winter blahs!

"The Masterpiece of Trade Shows™"

I took the day off from work yesterday so I could drive to the Baltimore Convention Center for the Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show, MANTS, which bills itself as "The Masterpiece of Trade Shows™", trademark symbol and all.  This was my second time attending MANTS, but my first time covering it as a blogger.  This is a huge 3-day event, drawing nearly a thousand exhibitors in the nursery and horticulture trade from all over the country and well over 10,000 registered attendees.   When I went last year, I was absolutely overwhelmed; I hoped that attending as a blogger would help me narrow my focus a bit as well as give me an excuse to talk to people!