A green event gets greener

One of the city's most colorful annual events is going green. The theme of the New England Spring Flower Show - which starts Saturday and continues through March 16 at the Bayside Expo Center - is "Rhapsody in Green." Thanks to innovative interpretations by many exhibitors, including a few featured here, this may be the most eco-friendly show in the event's 137-year history. - CAROL STOCKER

Big idea grows into 'Amazing Grass Family'

Psychotherapist Jill Nooney, 59, began making whimsical garden art from recycled junkyard finds 30 years ago to decorate her extensive gardens in Lee, N.H. Now people travel from all over New England to visit her 10 acres of allees and follies and to buy her art for their own home landscapes. But even more people know Nooney for her large and wildly creative art installations at the Flower Show.

"I do it because I go stir crazy in the winter and I like big projects," she said. Each year she starts with a thematic "big idea." This year's is called "The Amazing Grass Family: The One Family of Plants that Supports the Whole Family of Man."

Four members of the grass family - corn, wheat, rice, and bamboo - have been cultivated for millennia and made human civilization possible. In many cultures they were worshiped as deities, said Nooney. She thinks our arrogant attitudes toward pollution show that, unlike earlier societies, we take our food sources for granted.

Her exhibit features an enormous cornucopia made of steel armature with papier-mâché and ornamental grass. Out of the opening emerge two human forms, made of grass. Other sculptures include 10-foot corn towers, and sheaves of wheat, oats, and spelt that Nooney and her husband, Bob Munger, harvested in Vermont using hand scythes so as not to damage the stalks.

By the time she finished with her "big idea," Nooney needed to hire a 52-foot trailer to transport it to the Bayside Expo Center. Visit finegarden.com for more information and for dates when Nooney's home garden is open to visitors.

An anniversary, with gray and silver foliage

"Go green, plant silver, and conserve water!" That's the motto of horticulturalist and garden designer Warren Leach of Tranquil Lake Nursery. The specialty nursery in Rehoboth will exhibit plants with drought-defying silver and gray foliage. Because the silvery effect is created by tiny hairs that refract sunlight and reduce moisture evaporation, gray foliage is an adaptation often found among plants that have evolved in hot, dry, sunny places.

Leach has a sentimental reason for creating the exhibit with his wife, Debi Hogan. This show marks 20 years since they met at the Preview Party of the 1988 New England Spring Flower Show, when Hogan was starting the children's program for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, which stages the annual show.

These days Hogan has several "green" jobs. She is coordinator for the Massachusetts Envirothon, a natural resource program and statewide science competition for high school students (maenviro thon.org). Hogan also coordinates programs for Massachusetts Agriculture in the Classroom (aginclassroom.org), which raises awareness of where our food comes from. She also helps out at Tranquil Lake Nursery.

Leach and Hogan are perhaps best known for the amusing miniature gardens they make for the show each March. This year they've built a tiny homage to Roberto Burle Marx, the legendary Brazilian garden designer. Visit tranquil-lake.com and click on "Chinese Garden" to see photos of the couple's miniature garden from last year's flower show.

Loving the earth with a high-tech touch

Garden designer Carol Michener-Card (left) is taking the green theme of this year's flower show so seriously that her exhibit will feature solar panels and a wind turbine.

"I want people to see these things as aesthetically acceptable in the landscape," she said. "Some designers say they are out of place. But I say, 'You haven't seen landscapes in the Netherlands.' Windmills were once considered high-tech power plants. Now people think they are beautiful."

Michener-Card, owner of CMC Design in Lincoln, recently got her organic land care professional certification from the Northeast Organic Farming Association and specializes in environmentally friendly landscapes. Her 900-square-foot display will include a garden shed with a "green roof" planted with dragon's blood sedums, tri-colored stonecrop, and other plants commonly used as ground cover.

"Green roofs are a growing trend that helps to control temperature and water runoff, reduce noise, and absorb [carbon dioxide] in the atmosphere," said Michener-Card. But are they heavy enough to bring down the house? She's aiming to keep the roof's weight to 5 pounds per square foot by using lightweight expanded shale (baked slate) and vermiculite in the growing medium.

"I'm also using a canopy by SunScapes designs of Maine. When you set one up on the south side of a house in the summer the shade it creates acts like you planted an instant tree to reduce your air conditioning bill. I'll also have a rain garden, to absorb water, that will be planted with an allee of river birches. And, of course, a lot of other native plants," the designer said, noting that runoff is a major cause of watershed pollution.

"Through my work, I see the climate changing with more radical storms, more radical droughts," Michener-Card said. "It's happening now, whether people believe it or not. I want to help people take responsibility."